If you would win the world, melt it, do not hammer it.
Interpretation
Influencing others requires gentleness rather than force.
This quote suggests that to truly win the hearts and minds of people, one should approach them with kindness and compassion, rather than trying to impose one's will through aggression or force. It highlights the importance of understanding and connection in effective leadership and interaction.
In practice
During a community meeting, you might share this quote to emphasize the importance of approach in discussions.
Did any of you, parents, ever hear your child wake from sleep with some panic fear and shriek the mother's name through the darkness? Was not that a more powerful appeal than all words? And, depend upon it, that the soul which cries aloud on God, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," though it have "no language but a cry," will never call in vain.
Death is but a passage. It is not a house, it is only a vestibule. The grave has a door on its inner side.
Do not let the empty cup be your first teacher of the blessings you had when it was full. Do not let a bard place here and there in the bed destroy your rest. Seek, as a plain duty, to cultivate a buoyant, joyous sense of the crowded kindnesses of God in your daily life.
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
In making our decisions, we must use the brains that God has given us. But we must also use our hearts which He also gave us. A man who has not learned to say, No -who is not resolved that he will take God's way, in spite of every dog that can bay or bark at him, in spite of every silvery choice that woos him aside-will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies.
We can find true refuge within our own hearts and minds-right here, right now, in the midst of our moment-to-momen t lives. We find true refuge whenever we recognize the silent space of awareness behind all our busy doing and striving. We find refuge whenever our hearts open with tenderness and love. We find refuge whenever we connect with the innate clarity and intelligence of our true nature.
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too.
But their intervention makes our acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts.
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
Sometimes, you get no second chance and that its best to accept the gifts the world offers you.
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