When we contemplate the heroes of Christianity, and compare our feeble efforts with their astonishing performance and self devotion, we should fall into despair, were there not a few softening features, by which they are brought back to the ranks of ...
Lack of confidence, sometimes alternating with unrealistic dreams of heroic success, often leads to procrastination, and many studies suggest that procrastinators are self-handicappers: rather than risk failure, they prefer to create conditions that ...
The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else’s suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your mis...
I'm convinced that quite a lot of young people, when they get in trouble with the law, it's a cry for help there. Because it's not that they go out to offend. It's that their behaviour is self-parading, it's the big 'I'. And sometimes that means they...
(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience ...
Taken as a whole, Europe's share of world output is projected to fall by almost a third in the next two decades. This is the competitiveness challenge - and much of our weakness in meeting it is self-inflicted. Complex rules restricting our labour ma...
One of the saddest things I've seen in Amazonian cultures is people who were self-sufficient and happy that now think of themselves as poor and become dissatisfied with their lives. What worries me is outsiders trying to impose their values and mater...
The core of your true self is never lost. Let go of all the pretending and the becoming you've done just to belong. Curl up with your rawness and come home. You don't have to find yourself; you just have to let yourself in.
Every thing's for sale out here. Anything you want. About the only thing you can't buy is my dignity and self-respect, cause those were the first to go. And I gave them away for free. - excerpt from: freefalling
Anger met with anger only increases enmity rather than diffusing a tense situation. Anger, in turn, gives birth to hate. In such cases the wisest thing to do is not to engage through emotion. Emotions are self-centered and denying them spares animosi...
Reassuring a jealous woman that you don't want her man creates the bigger beast of resentment because that tells her that what she has isn't desirable and to her, where the opinions of others correlates to her self-worth, is unforgivable.
The ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as...
What I really enjoy about writing for orchestras is realizing that - and it's kind of self-evident - but the fact that they are 48 individuals. It's not, you know, a preset on a keyboard. It's all these people who have opinions and who are making dec...
Brutes are governed by their appetites and impulses. Savages are but little removed in this respect from brutes. Brutish men and coarse natures are mostly led by their impulses, appetites and passions. The true nobility of our nature is evinced by se...
The kinds of roles dogs fill can be hard to come by in human relationships. We touch the dog or the pet at whim. There is a lack of self-consciousness and a fluidity to it that is absent from most human relationships. If someone acted that way to you...
Clarice Starling: But I thought the "yourself" reference was too hokey for Lecter, so I figured he's from Baltimore, and I looked in the phone book, and there's a "Your Self Storage" facility, right outside of downtown Baltimore, sir.
What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the s...
You often hear people say 'Luck is self made.' I think it is, to a certain extent; if you work hard on something, you are more likely to be lucky than if you don't. That having been said, I do believe during in my career I have been at the right plac...
If someone decides they're not going to be happy, it's not your problem. You don't have to spend your time and energy trying to cheer up someone who has already decided to stay in a bad mood. Believe it or not, you can actually hurt people by playing...
I went through a low phase for two years when I had a string of flops. At that time, I even felt that I was in the wrong profession and that I should leave acting. But thankfully, I utilised that time to introspect and went on a self-exploration trip...
Daisy: I promise you, I'll never lose myself to self-pity again. Benjamin Button: [while the day begins] And I think, right there and then, she realized none of us is perfect forever.