To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity.
Frederick William RobertsonRead
As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.
Interpretation
Growth often comes from setbacks and failures.
This quote illustrates the idea that just as a tree can thrive from decay and what it sheds, individuals and societies also improve through their struggles and disappointments. It emphasizes that adversity and challenges are essential for personal and collective growth, teaching resilience and wisdom through the process of refinement from past failures.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity.
The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones.
No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.
In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it.
The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.
There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.
I fear three newspapers more than a hundred thousand bayonets.
It's personal freedom, not hundred dollar bills that lights the soul's cigar.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
She was in that highly-wrought state when the reasoning powers act with great rapidity: the state a man is in before a battle or a struggle, in danger, and at the decisive moments of life - those moments when a man shows once and for all what he is worth, that his past was not lived in vain but was a preparation for these moments.
It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.
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