Though all afflictions are evils in themselves, yet they are good for us, because they discover to us our disease and tend to our cure.
Interpretation
Afflictions reveal our problems and can lead to personal growth and healing.
This quote by John Tillotson suggests that while afflictions may initially seem like purely negative experiences, they serve a greater purpose by uncovering our inner issues and prompting a healing process. Such challenges can lead us to self-discovery and improvement, emphasizing the idea that adversity can foster personal growth and resilience.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience during tough times.
Men expect that religion should cost them no pains, that happiness should drop into their laps without any design and endeavor on their part, and that, after they have done what they please while they live, God should snatch them up to heaven when they die. But though the commandments of God be not grievous, yet it is fit to let men know that they are not thus easy.
The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.
By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.
There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.
The qualities we have, make us so ridiculous as those which we affect.
The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.
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