Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it. Bitterness paralyzes life; love empowers it. Bitterness sours life; love sweetens it. Bitterness sickens life; love heals it. Bitterness blinds life; love anoints its eyes.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts bitterness and love, highlighting how love can liberate and heal, while bitterness can imprison and harm.
This quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick emphasizes the profound impact of love versus bitterness in our lives. It illustrates how holding onto bitterness confines us, leading to negativity and suffering, while embracing love can lead to personal empowerment, healing, and a more fulfilling existence. The metaphorical language conveys that love acts as an antidote to the ailments caused by bitterness, suggesting that love not only enriches our lives but also enhances our perception and understanding of the world.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming hardship, you could use this quote to highlight the importance of love.
Nothing else matters much...not wealth, nor learning, nor even health...without this gift: the spiritual capacity to keep zest in living. This is the creed of creeds, the final deposit and distillation of all important faiths: that you should be able to believe in life.
No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it, by vigorously willing to have it ... Peace is a consciousness of springs too deep for earthly droughts to dry up. Peace is the gift not of volitional struggle but of spiritual hospitality.
I renounce war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatred it arouses, for the dictatorships it puts in place of democracy, for the starvation that stalks after it. I renounce war, and never again, directly or indirectly, will I sanction or support another.
He who cannot rest, cannot work; he who cannot let go, cannot hold on; he who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.
Nothing in this world is more inspiring than a soul up against crippling circumstances who carries it off with courage and faith and undefeated character-nothing! See Light From Many Lamps, edited by L. E. Watson, article by H. E. Fosdick, pp. 93-94 re: a serious cripple who succeeded.
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
No man has ever lived that had enough of children's gratitude or woman's love.
I will love you forever" swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday" - Is that still as easy?
...she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, "Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?
I have a terrific marriage, but unlike a lot of relationships where they ebb and flow, no matter what happens you fall deeper and deeper in love every day. It's kind of the best thing that can happen to you. It's thrilling.
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.
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