Precept & Practice – MARCH 21 – Conducting and Non-conducting

Your godmother writes such pleasant things of you…..   They so thoroughly like you and admire your pretty face:  this will not make you vain.   Partial appreciation always did me good.   It is only when people rate us a little above our true standard that we can come up to it. 

Life of Lucy Smith

The ‘virtuous woman’ would set herself to be a non-conductor of ‘stings and arrows,’ while she would pass on to us the pleasant things our friends say, which make us feel ‘on the sunny side of the wall.’   What was said of St. Theresa will be true of her – ‘It came to be understood that absent people were safe where she was.’   It would be hard to exaggerate the power for good which the confidence she had thus won must have given her.  Her nobility felt the treachery which always lies in detraction, the kind of advantage taken, as it were, of the unprotectedness of the absent.

L. H. M. Soulsby

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From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW