Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
Interpretation
Humility is the foundation from which all positive qualities and virtues grow.
This quote by Thomas Moore suggests that humility is an essential quality that nurtures and supports the development of all other virtuous traits. By likening humility to a 'low, sweet root,' Moore emphasizes its understated yet vital role in fostering kindness, generosity, and other heavenly virtues that enrich our lives and those around us.
In practice
During a team meeting, one might say, 'As Thomas Moore said, 'Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot,' to emphasize the importance of being humble in our collaborative efforts.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.
I'm always wary of the lessons of the past. There's a lot of past out there, and you can draw whatever lessons you want.
Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
You can ensure the success of your attacks if you only attack places that are undefended. You can ensure the safety of your defense if you only hold positions that cannot be attacked. Therefore, that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.
You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did anything wrong, but because I had to get into the natural flow of my being as a woman.
When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.
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