What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and Happiness — John Shaqi
What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and HappinessTrine, Ralph Waldo
Religion
What All The World's A-Seeking: The Vital Law of True Life, True Greatness Power and Happiness
Trine, Ralph Waldo
Character; Christian life; Conduct of life
life of this same poor woman beautiful and happy and sweet in its
humility; that would give us a nation of statesmen in place of, with now
and then an exception, a nation of politicians, each one bent upon his
own personal aggrandizement at the expense of the general good; that
would go far, ay, very far toward solving our great and hard-pressing
social problems with which we are already face to face; that, in short,
would make each man a prince among men, and each woman a queen among
women.
I have seen the supreme happiness in lives where this principle has been
caught and laid hold of, some, lives that seemed not to have much in
them before, but which under its wonderful influences have been so
transformed and so beautified, that have been made so sweet and so
strong, so useful and so precious, that each day seems to them all too
short, the same time that before, when they could scarcely see what was
in life to make it worth the living, dragged wearily along. So there
are countless numbers of people in the world with lives that seem not to
have much in them, among the wealthy classes and among the poorer, who
might under the influence of this great, this simple principle, make
them so precious, so rich, and so happy that time would seem only too
short, and they would wonder why they have been so long running on the
wrong track, for it is true that much the larger portion of the world
to-day is on the wrong track in the pursuit of happiness; but almost all
are there, let it be said, not through choice, but by reason of not
knowing the right, the true one.
The fact that really great, true, and happy lives have been lived in the
past and are being lived to-day gives us our starting-point. Time and
again I have examined such lives in a most careful endeavor to find what
has made them so, and have found that in _each and every_ individual
case this that we have now come to has been the great central principle
upon which they have been built. I have also found that in numbers of
lives where it has not been, but where almost every effort apart from it
has been made to make them great, true, and happy, they have not been
so; and also that no life built upon it in sufficient degree, other
things being equal, has failed in being thus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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