We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
However much we guard against it, we tend to shape ourselves in the image others have of us.
Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about.
Those who lack the capacity to achieve much in an atmosphere of freedom will clamor for power.
How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!
Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities.
Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”
There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.
Every extreme attitude is a fight from the self.
A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism.
Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. This is as evil a misuse of others as the practice of exploitation.
It is a sign of creeping inner death when we can no longer praise the living.
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
We can never really be prepared for that which is wholly new. We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves. It needs subordinate self-confidence to face drastic change without inner trembling.
The aspiration toward freedom is the most essentially human of all human manifestations.
The self-despisers are less intent on their own increase than on the diminution of others. Where self-esteem is unobtainable, envy takes the place of greed.
In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat.
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him.
To the creative individual all experience is seminal-all events are equidistant from new ideasand insights.
The Renaissance was a time of mercenary soldiers, ours is a time of mercenary labor.