Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the altar of conformity and popularity.
Interpretation
Sacrificing one's ideals for the sake of fitting in leads to a loss of personal integrity.
This quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining one's character and integrity in the face of societal pressures to conform. Charles Spurgeon suggests that by prioritizing conformity and popularity over one's high ideals, individuals risk losing their true selves and the values that define them, ultimately leading to a degradation of personal character and authenticity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of staying true to oneself.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
When you see no present advantage, walk by faith and not by sight. Do God the honor to trust Him when it comes to matters of loss for the sake of principle.
It is far easier to fight with sin in public than to pray against it in private.
You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.
After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.
["All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant."] The original Hebrew word that has been translated "paths" means "well-worn roads' or "wheel tracks," such ruts as wagons make when they go down our green roads in wet weather and sink in up to the axles. God's ways are at times like heavy wagon tracks that cut deep into our souls, yet all of them are merciful.
The working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are responsible for everything that takes place, the good things and the bad things. True enough, they suffer most from a war, but it is their apathy, craving for authority, etc., that is most responsible for making wars possible. It follows of necessity from this responsibility that the working masses of men and women, they and they alone, are capable of establishing lasting peace.
God is a too palpably clumsy answer; an answer which shows a lack of delicacy towards us thinkers-fundamentally, even a crude prohibition to us: you shall not think!
The world's problems transcend borders.
The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.
Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.
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