What you've got to do is recognize that you don't control everything for a start, you've got to play the cards you're dealt, the hand of cards you're dealt, as best you can, and that's what I always seek to do.
Interpretation
Recognize and accept your circumstances, and make the best of them.
This quote emphasizes the importance of acknowledging that there are factors in life that are beyond our control. It suggests that instead of lamenting over these uncontrollable elements, we should focus on using our resources wisely and making the best decisions possible with what we have, much like playing a hand of cards as effectively as we can.
In practice
This quote can be used as a reminder during a motivational speech about resilience.
Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.
The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management.
It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'
I am an ambitious person, but I am not ambitious in the sense that I want jobs only for the sake of them... I am here to do things I think are worthwhile. I am always careful that the political positions I take are consistent with good policy. I would not want to be prime minister of Australia at any price.
A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.
The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it.
The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known, and exist, before it is generally received and practiced on.
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than it is to do important things that are not urgent, like thinking. And it’s also easier to do little things we know we can do than to start on big things that we’re not so sure about.
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