“And yet these things for which we should strive eagerly, things so closely akin to ourselves, so truly our own, we treat with great slackness and constant indifference and thus destroy the germs of excellence, while those things in which deficiency were a merit we desire with an insatiable yearning.”

71.
Every Good Man is Free

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Nov. 18, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "And yet these things for which we should strive eagerly, things so closely akin to ourselves, so truly our own, we trea…" by Philo?

Philo41

Roman philosopher -15–45 BC

Related quotes

“For those things which were done either by our fathers, or ancestors, and in which we ourselves had no share, we can scarcely call our own.”
Nam genus et proavos et quae non fecimus ipsi, Vix ea nostra voco.

Ovid Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses (Transformations)

“We tell our children things which we know are not so, but which we wish were so.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

“Connected yet alienated - that is the paradox of our global digital culture. We have access to so many things, yet we are increasingly incapable of seeing those things, or ourselves, in any meaningful context.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“God has filled our hearts with desires so vast and so magnificent that nothing in creation is capable of satisfying them. Thus it is that in the hope of finding some pleasure, we attach ourselves to created objects and that we have no sooner possessed and sampled that which we have so ardently desired than we turn to something else, hoping to find what we wanted. We are, then, through our own experience, constrained to admit that it is but useless for us to want to derive our happiness here below from transient things. If we hope to have any consolation in this world, it will only be by despising the things which are passing and which have no lasting value and in striving towards the noble and happy end for which God has created us. Do you want to be happy, my friends? Fix your eyes on Heaven; it is there that your hearts will find that which will satisfy them completely.”

John Vianney (1786–1859) French priest and saint

Do You Want to Be Happy?

“America is a great force for freedom and prosperity. Yet our greatness is not measured in power or luxuries, but by who we are and how we treat one another. So we strive to be a compassionate, decent, hopeful society.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2006, State of the Union (January 2006)

“There are some things that are as basic and as structural in history, and if we don’t know these things, we are in danger of destroying ourselves and our world.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Discerning the Signs of History (1964)
Context: There are some things that are as basic and as structural in history, and if we don’t know these things, we are in danger of destroying ourselves and our world. Discerning the signs of history, will tell us first that evil carries the seed of its own destruction. That is just as true as the rising and setting of the sun.