As soon as by one's own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one's own right i...s laid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than ...your own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then it doesn't Matter that the deaths come in the wrong order. All has been so easily... Written about. And you find the right order after all: play, the streets, shopping, time flying.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The freedom to share one's insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienabl...e right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reason I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I the...refore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this si...mple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may "have a good conscience."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »