The good are better made by ill, As odours crushed are sweeter still.
Interpretation
Adversity can enhance the goodness in people, much like crushed flowers can emit a stronger fragrance.
This quote reflects the idea that challenges and negative experiences can foster growth and resilience in individuals. Just as flowers release a sweeter scent when crushed, people often show greater strength and character when they face difficulties, revealing their true goodness in the process.
In practice
A motivational speech discussing how challenges shape us into better individuals.
Almost all men are over anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste for natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor and on they go as their fathers went before them till weary and sick at heart they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood.
Sweet Memory! wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the stream of Time I turn my sail.
Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle everyday? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything anther than galloping neurosis?
Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.
The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Great healers, people of divine realization, do not cure by chance but by exact knowledge.
Though I have drawn my sword in the present generous struggle for the rights of men, yet I am not in arms as an American, nor am I in pursuit of riches. My fortune is liberal enough, having no wife nor family, and having lived long enough to know that riches cannot ensure happiness.
In today's rush we all think too much, seek too much, want too much and forget about the joy of just Being.
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