The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.
Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual.
Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.
Pride can come in bloated form. This is the puffed-up Donald Trump style of pride. This person wants people to see visible proof of his superiority. He wants to be on the VIP list. In conversation, he boasts, he brags. He needs to see his superiority reflected in other people’s eyes. He believes that this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him peace. That version is familiar. But.
Adam I achieves success by winning victories over others. But Adam II builds character by winning victories over the weaknesses in himself.
Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half-truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but.
A person does not choose a vocation. A vocation is a calling.
People who see themselves as the center of their solar system, often get enraptured by their own terrible but also delicious suffering. People who see themselves as a piece of a larger universe and a longer story rarely do.
Our perception of the world is a fantasy that coincides with reality.
I hope that in victory we are more grateful than proud.
Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort.
The median narcissism score has risen 30 percent in the last two decades. Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago.4 The largest gains have been in the number of people who agree with the statements “I am an extraordinary person” and “I like to look at my body.
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
That person then, whoever it may be,” Cicero wrote in Tusculan Disputations, “whose mind is quiet through consistency and self-control, who finds contentment in himself, who neither breaks down in adversity nor crumbles in fright, nor burns with any thirsty need nor dissolves into wild and futile excitement, that person is the wise one we are seeking, and that person is happy.
A dozen voices from across the institution told students that while those who lead flat and unremarkable lives may avoid struggle, a well-lived life involves throwing oneself into struggle, that large parts of the most worthy lives are spent upon the rack, testing moral courage and facing opposition and ridicule, and that those who pursue struggle end up being happier than those who pursue pleasure.
The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.
The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles.
The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others.
We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. We’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.