Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.
Alfred Whitney GriswoldRead
Self-respect cannot be hunted. It cannot be purchased. It is never for sale. It cannot be fabricated out of public relations. It comes to us when we are alone, in quiet moments, in quiet places, when we suddenly realize that, knowing the good, we have done it; knowing the beautiful, we have served it; knowing the truth we have spoken it
Interpretation
Self-respect is an intrinsic quality that cannot be bought or influenced by others.
This quote by Alfred Whitney Griswold emphasizes that self-respect is not something that can be acquired through external means such as fame, money, or social standing. Instead, it is a profound internal recognition of our own actions and values, realized in moments of solitude and reflection, where we acknowledge the goodness, beauty, and truth we strive to embody in our lives.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of valuing oneself.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail.
A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience.
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.
Sri Yukteswar showed no special consideration to those who happened to be powerful or accomplished; neither did he slight others for their poverty or illiteracy. He would listen respectfully to words of truth from a child, and openly ignore a conceited pundit.
If a man gets drunk and goes out and breaks his leg so that it must be amputated, God will forgive him if he asks it, but he will have to hop around on one leg all his life.
Gratitude opens the door to... the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude.
In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species.
The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.
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