Relaxation is the doorway to both wisdom and compassion.
Think of all the really successful men and women you know. Do you know a single one who didn't learn very young the trick of calling attention to himself in the right quarters?
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.
In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.
. . . we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
In the United States at present the 'culture wars' of the last thirty years have now produced a horrid stand-off which compels you all into a binary eitheror with all kinds of spin-offs. This is deeply unhealthy. The trouble is that the way the system is set up in order to get in and try to change it you have to be (a) a millionaire, (b) someone who can work inside the system long-term, (c) someone prepared to make deals and compromises. . . Which does rule out the vast majority of committed Christians.
I'm a director's actor; I'm a storyteller's actor.
Youth is rather to be pitied than envied by people in years since it is doomed to toil through the rugged road of life which the others have passed through, in search of happiness that is not to be met with in it and that, at the highest, can be compounded for only by the blessing of a contented mind.
The readiness to sacrifice one's personal work and, if necessary, even one's life for others shows its most highly developed form in the Aryan race. The greatness of the Aryan is not based on his intellectual powers; but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of his community.