Where the soul is full of peace and joy, outward surrounding and circumstances are of comparatively little account.
Interpretation
Inner peace outweighs external circumstances.
This quote emphasizes the importance of inner tranquility and contentment, suggesting that when one's soul is filled with peace and joy, external factors become less significant in determining happiness and well-being. It highlights the notion that true happiness arises from within rather than from our surroundings or conditions.
In practice
In a motivational speech about resilience during tough times.
You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord with the management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your case be any more complex or difficult than these, that you need to be anxious or troubled about His management of it?
To be one of God's lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work.
Many Christians still at bottom look upon God as one of the most selfish, self-absorbed Beings in the universe, far more selfish than they could think it right to be themselves, -intent only upon His own honor and glory, looking out continually that His own rights are never trampled on; and so absorbed in thoughts of Himself and of His own righteousness, as to have no love or pity to spare for the poor sinners who have offended Him.
Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective. But this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are - or as we are conditioned to see it.
But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you-the social reformers-see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them.
Patriarchy has stolen our cosmos and returned it in the form of 'Cosmopolitan' magazine and cosmetics.
We are all immersed in the atmosphere of our own thinking, which is the direct result of all we have ever said, thought or done. This decides what is to take place in our lives.
A man's rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
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