One hundred years is at the heights of a long life. Less than one in a thousand people attain it.
Let us take an example [typical] of someone who does. Much of it is taken up by infancy and old age. Much of the rest is taken up by sleep and wasted time. And much of what’s left is filled up with pain and sickness, sorrow and misfortune/suffering, ruin and loss, and anxieties and fears.
This perhaps leaves several years—and of this, I reckon that the time he is truly content and liberated barely amounts to much at all.
So what is human existence for, and what makes it pleasant?
Only comfort and luxury? Only music/color and beauty/sounds/senses/beautiful-women?
Ah, but we cannot always be satisfied by the former, nor incessantly enjoy he latter.
Besides, there is the stimulus/extortion/seduction of rewards and the warning of punishments, the urging of fame and the repelling of laws. People are constantly rendered anxious/busy striving/struggling for one hollow moment of praise, and scheming for the glory that is to survive after their death. Even in in solitude, they contemplate and comply with what they think others want them to see, hear, think, feel, and do, and they discredit/repent what their own selves feel and think. They vainly lose the realest enjoyments of life’s time, and cannot really give way for a moment. How different is this from being a chained in prison?
The ancients knew that all creatures enter life in a moment, and must depart in death at one moment. Therefore they followed their hearts and did not deny themselves these natural inclinations. During life, they were not seeking fame/reputation, but were only following their own nature. They went smoothly on their path unvaried from their inclinations.
For fame’s sake they endure all kinds of bodily hardship and mental pain. … The ignorant, while seeking to maintain fame, sacrifice reality. By doing so they will have to regret that nothing can rescue them from danger and death, and not only learn to know the difference between ease and pleasure and sorrow and grief.
Whenever a man says he is great, he is thinking of the past, and this is not good. A man should continue to express himself. The true Self exists moment by moment, and the challenge of PL is ever leading us forward to a more artistic life.
You cannot at this instance write on a blackboard that exists in time twenty minutes from now. You cannot sit at a desk that existed yesterday and then lost its existence. In the same way, Self can only relate to other existences conterminous with the present.
Health comes before making a livelihood.
A person should stay alive, if only out of curiosity.
Every answer can result in a new question.
Being too nice can cost a lot.
If one soldier understood the thoughts of another, there would be no wars.
Cold strengthens you more than hunger.
A penny saved is a penny earned, but sometimes a penny is better spent than saved.
God created people because he loves stories.
When brains are needed, brawn won’t help.
In order to persuade someone it is necessary to merit his sympathy; now, one never gains the sympathy of those whose opinions he does not share.
Hence, in order to persuade successfully, one must banish suspicion and know how to listen.
To be able to persuade a patient that he is cured is, in most eases, to free him from his malady...
Influence over others is acquired especial by perseverance of the will and concentration of thought, the undulations of which, project around us, come to reach the minds that we wish to impress.
With perseverance, you succeed in causing effectively to penetrate the minds of your hearers the thoughts the emission of which will attract similar thoughts, and their undulations returning to affect you will increase your conviction, giving you thus the more power to spread it around you.
Intensity of determination, when it reaches a certain point, possesses a dazzling influence which few ordinary mortals can resist, for it envelops them before they are aware of it and thus before they have dreamt of endeavoring to withdraw themselves front it.
They are rare who are morally sufficient for themselves and who pass through life without feeling the need of resting their weakness on a supporting and directing force.
Still less numerous are those who accept with courage the consequences of their acts and do not seek to place the responsibility for these acts on an outside influence, which, however, they are ready to repudiate if they are successful.
Who does the best his circumstance allows
Does well, acts nobly; angels could no more.
The man that blushes is not quite a brute.
I had looked for happiness in fast living, but it was not there. I tried to find it in money, but it was not there either. But when I placed myself in tune with what I believe to be the fundamental truths of life, when I began to develop my limited ability, to rid my mind of all kinds of tangled thoughts, and fill it with zeal and courage and love, when I gave myself a chance by treating myself decently and sensibly, I began to feel the stimulating, warm glow of happiness.
The superior person deals with the root. Once the root is established, tao unfolds.
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.