The longer I live, the more I am enabled to realize that I have but one life to live on Earth, and that this one life is but a brief life, for sowing, in comparison with eternity, for reaping.
Interpretation
Life is fleeting, and we must make the most of our time on Earth as it is brief compared to eternity.
In this quote, George Muller reflects on the brevity of human life in the grand scheme of eternity. He emphasizes that our time on Earth is limited and should be spent purposefully, with an understanding that our actions in this life have lasting impacts, akin to sowing seeds that will later bear fruit in a metaphorical sense. This idea encourages individuals to be mindful of how they live their lives and the legacy they leave behind.
In practice
In a motivational speech about living purposefully.
A child rightly trained may be a world-wide blessing, with an influence reaching onward to eternal years. But a neglected or misdirected directed child may live to blight and blast mankind, and leave influences of evil which shall roll on in increasing volume till they plunge into the gulf of eternal perdition.
The less we read the Word of God, the less we desire to read it, and the less we pray, the less we desire to pray.
The Lord never lays more on us, in the way of chastisement, than our state of heart makes needful; so that whilst He smites with the one hand, He supports with the other.
I desire many things concerning myself; but I desire nothing so much, as to have a heart filled with love to the Lord. I long for a warm personal attachment to Him.
The vigor of our spiritual life will be in exact proportion to the place held by the Bible in our life and thoughts.
If honest of heart and uprightness before God were lacking or if I did not patiently wait on God for instruction, or if I preferred the counsel of my fellow-men to the declarations of the Word of God, I made great mistakes.
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.
Truth be told, John said, the one thing in this world I want more than anything else is a great big crowbar, to jimmy myself open and take whatever creature that's sitting inside and shake it clean like a rug and then rinse it in a cold, clear lake like up in Oregon, and then I want to put it under the sun to let it heal and dry and grow and sit and come to consciousness again with a clear and quiet mind.
Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!
Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? What sinews are those? - A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised; careful resolutions; unerring decisions.
Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
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