Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight; its string can so often depart and turn into a relish when, after vainly seeking to shun it, we agree to face about and bear it...
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Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
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It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.
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Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.
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The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
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Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.
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Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
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We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.
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A genius is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.
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There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.
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The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.
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To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
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Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
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To spend life for something which outlasts it.
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I will act as if what I do makes a difference.
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Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.
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Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
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A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.
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Only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
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This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
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Human beings are born into this little span of life of which the best thing is its friendship and intimacies, and soon their places will know them no more, and yet they leave their friendships and intimacies with no cultivation, to grow as they will by the roadside, expecting them to 'keep' by force of inertia.
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Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that assures the successful outcome of any venture.
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Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.
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Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.
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Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly.
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If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
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Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout.
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The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success' - is our national disease.
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The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
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Same old slippers, Same old rice, Same old glimpse of paradise.
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