For all your days be prepared, and meet them ever alike. When you are the anvil, bear - when you are the hammer, strike.
Interpretation
Be prepared for life's challenges and respond appropriately to different situations.
This quote emphasizes the importance of readiness and adaptability in life. It conveys that one should be prepared for whatever comes their way, whether facing challenges (being the anvil) or taking action (being the hammer), thus balancing acceptance and assertiveness.
In practice
Using this quote to inspire students during a graduation speech about the importance of being prepared for the future.
Greed and Gain, grim guardians of the great god Mammon, continually cry in the ears of the poor, 'Give us your little ones!' And forever do the poor push out their little ones at the imperious ukase, feeding the children to a blind Hunger that is never filled.
Sorrows come to stretch out places in the heart for joy.
There is a destiny which makes us brothers; none goes his way alone. All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.
The crest and crowning of all good, life's final star, is Brotherhood.
He drew a circle that shut me out- Heretic , rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle and took him In ! From the poem " Outwitted
The sequoias belong to the silences of the milleniums. Many of them have seen a hundred human generations rise, give off their little clamors and perish. They seem indeed to be forms of immortality standing here amoing the transitory shapes of time.
Darling, replied Valentine, has not the count just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words,- "Wait and hope"?
Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
But when I thought I hit bottom, it started hitting back. There is no bruise like the bruise loneliness kicks into your spine.
Saints spring and thrive most internally, when they are most externally afflicted. Afflictions are the mother of virtue.
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