A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
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Another kind of love and compassion is not based on something appearing beautiful or nice, but based on the fact that the other person, just like oneself, wants happiness and does not want suffering and indeed has every right to be happy and to overcome suffering. On such a basis, we feel a sense of responsibility, a sense of closeness toward that being. That is true compassion. This is because the compassion is based on reason, notjust on emotional feeling. As a consequence, it does not matter what the other's attitude is, whether negative, or positive. What matters is that it is a human being, a sentient being that has the experience of pain and pleasure. There is no reason not to feel compassion so long as it is a sentient being.
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Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
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Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
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But when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money--booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!
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To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is itself to succumb to the violence of our times. Frenzy destroys our inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
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I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
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To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life slowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
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Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.
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The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
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It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
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It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.
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To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
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Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
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To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
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It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
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It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.
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The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
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To become oneself, with all one's strength. Difficult. A bomb, a speech, a rifle shot -- and the world can look a different place. And then where is this self
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Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.
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The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and in exactly the right places.
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Why not be oneself That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekinese
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One must be truthful with oneself about one's own motives, especially if one is to survive in the world. It takes rigor, and it takes courage.
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To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.
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That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.
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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
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A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
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A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
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The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
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