The years have taught me one skill: how to be miserable. I know how to shut up and keep humping. This is a great asset because it’s human, the proper role for a mortal.
I hold Olympic records for procrastination. I can procrastinate thinking about my procrastination problem.
My role-options in life and career, I realized, were not limited to Businessman, Athlete, and Boneheaded Patriot.
All of a sudden I understood why I was so moody, neurotic, simultaneously paranoid and megalomaniac, mistrustful, uneasy, driven by ambition but paralyzed by guilt about my ambition, horny, obsessive, compulsive, obsessive-compulsive, not to mention shy, withdrawn, and dandruff-ridden. I was creative. All creative people were like that!
Sharon was a realist. He recognized, as did Ben-Gurion and Dayan, that the Arabs had as legitimate a claim to this land as we did, and that they possessed pride and courage and anger, against which no rejoinder existed except the sword.
A nation is born in blood and purchases with blood its right to stand in the ranks with other nations.
The enemy is in you, but it is not you.
He looks upon sky and steppe and sees that which God has created. I look and see God Himself.
It’s okay to be an introvert, to seek out the quiet corners at a cocktail party, to care about quality, to have your mood be affected by your surroundings.
The linebacker and the Army Ranger go into action as part of a team. But the artist and the entrepreneur enter combat alone. I take my hat off to every man or woman who does this.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God who is our home.
Remember, the Muse favors working stiffs. She hates prima donnas. To the gods the supreme sin is not rape or murder, but pride. To think of yourself as a mercenary, a gun for hire, implants the proper humility. It purges pride and preciousness.
Nor am I “leading” in any way that the military manuals would recognise or commend. I’m just slogging miserably beside the others. But we are one, each giving his all. I catch a second wind, and I feel my brothers-in-arms catch theirs too. By.
The professional arms himself with patience, not only to give the stars time to align in his career, but to keep himself from flaming out in each individual work. He knows that any job, whether it’s a novel or a kitchen remodel, takes twice as long as he thinks and costs twice as much. He accepts that. He recognizes it as reality. The.
But convey this, above all, to your men: let them not yield preeminence in valor to the Spartans, rather strive to outdo them. Remember, in warfare practice of arms counts for little. Courage tells all, and we Spartans have no monopoly on that. Lead your men with this in mind and all will be well.” TWENTY-THREE It was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon.
Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it.
When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens. A crack appears in the membrane. Like the first craze when a chick pecks at the inside of its shell. Angel midwives congregate around us; they assist as we give birth to ourselves, to that person we were born to be, to the one whose destiny was encoded in our soul, our daimon, our genius.
When we conceive an enterprise and commit to it in the face of our fears, something wonderful happens.
You become an artist once you start saying that you are an artist.