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.
Some people seem to believe that for each problem there is a solution readily available - a solution that can be promptly achieved by passing a law and voting some money. I think of this as the vending machine concept of social change. Put a coin in the machine and out comes a piece of candy. If there is a social problem, pass a law and out comes a solution.
This is the kind of balance people expect: both environment and the economy - not one or the other.
We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
I think that where you go wrong is that you imagine that your reasons for living ought to fall on you, ready-made from heaven, whereas we have to find them for ourselves.
The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
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