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.
We believe that salvation is to be found in wholesome work in a beloved land. Work will provide our people with the bread of tomorrow, and moreover, with the honor of the tomorrow, the freedom of the tomorrow.
Unless a man feels he has a good enough memory, he should never venture to lie.
I would like to say, ladies and gentlemen, that you shouldn't be afraid of who you are. That's the first key idea. You shouldn't be afraid of who you are. You should NOT be afraid of who you are. It's very important for you to realize that.
After that [father's death] I never cried with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain. At the age of five I had become a skeptic and began to sense that any happiness that came my way might be the prelude to some grim cosmic joke.
I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
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