Scaffolding

Our true life is not this external, material life that passes before our eyes here on earth, but the inner life of our spirit, for which the visible life serves only as a scaffolding—a necessary aid to our spiritual growth.

Seeing before him an enormously high and elaborately constructed scaffolding, while the building itself only just shows above its foundations, man is apt to make the mistake of attaching more importance to the scaffolding than to the building for whose sake the former has been temporarily put up.

We must remind ourselves and one another that the scaffolding has no meaning and importance except to render possible the erection of the building itself.

Author: Leo Tolstoy