“The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.”

Guru/Gnani
Source: I am That, P.131.

1940s, Third Inaugural Address (1941)
Context: Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

Special message to the Congress on National Health Needs (65)" (27 February 1962) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx
1962

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

2015, Young African Leaders Initiative Presidential Summit Town Hall speech (August 2015)
Context: The best measure of how a country does economically in terms of development is how does it treat its women. And as I said in a speech -- a couple of the speeches that I gave while I was in Kenya and Ethiopia -- if you’re mistreating your women, then you’re just holding yourself back, you’re holding yourself down. You may have some false sense of importance, but ultimately you don’t benefit if women are being discriminated against, because that means when they’re working, your family is going to have less income. If they’re not educated, that means your children are less likely to be well educated, because, typically, the mother is the first educator of a child. So if they see you disrespecting your wife, then what lesson is your -- not just your girls, but what lessons are your sons learning from you? […] You do not lift yourself up by holding somebody else down.

The Ode of perfect Years, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxxii

Source: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness