If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of resilience and faith in overcoming challenges.
Johannes Tauler's quote speaks to the necessity of perseverance in the face of failure. It suggests that regardless of how many times one may stumble, what truly matters is the ability to rise again, with the support of faith or a higher power, rather than succumbing to despair. The act of returning to God symbolizes seeking guidance and strength to face life's challenges more effectively.
In practice
This quote can be used to encourage students who are facing academic struggles to keep trying.
Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.
If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.
If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, 'Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.'
I'm for human lib, the liberation of all people, not just black people or female people or gay people.
I carried out my orders until arrested. I had no sense that I was spying, and I ask that this be taken into account in deciding my verdict.
Not only do we suffer from racism and sexism, but we also suffer from ageism. And that is that once you reach a certain age, you're not allowed to be adventurous, you're not allowed to be sexual and I think that's rather hideous. [...] I mean, is there a rule? Are you just supposed to die when you're 40?
I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
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