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.
Interpretation
We often rush to solve problems without fully understanding ourselves or the situation.
In this quote, Thomas Moore reflects on our society's tendency to seek quick solutions and avoid the discomfort of introspection. He emphasizes that this eagerness to 'bottom-line' conflicts and challenges prevents us from engaging in deeper self-discovery and truly understanding our motivations and inner complexities.
In practice
During a workshop on personal growth, this quote can serve as a reminder to take time to reflect.
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.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
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.
Be grateful that your righteous life molds you so that you don’t fit where you don’t belong
I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings and strictly honest, who complained of hard luck. A good character, good habits and iron industry are impregnable to the assaults of all ill-luck that fools ever dreamed.
Everything you touch touches you.
To be a real man or woman, you've got to know what you believe in. You've got to understand that your actions have consequences and that they are connected to everything that you are.
A drop of ink may make a million think.
I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.
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