Not to accept your mistakes is to increase them.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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Mistakes →
Capability →
Every person has within himself the capability to understand the life of all humanity. This capability is hidden deep in the soul, but it exists, and sooner or later, a person will find it.
~ Edward Carpenter
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Trust yourself and promise →
What we seek out is someone who sees us and consistently keeps their promises to bring us the magic we were hoping for. Someone who has committed to rhyming with what they did yesterday. When you trust yourself enough to turn pro, You’re entering into a covenant with those you seek to serve. You promise to design with intention, and they agree to engage with the work you promised to bring them.
~ Seth Godin
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Virtue and vice →
When the intellect becomes the slave of vices and passions, the supporter of lies, it becomes not only a perversion, but an illness, and we cannot see the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, virtue and vice.
~ William Ellery Channing
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Expanding our understanding →
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns us, “when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearances, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which inside is full of hidden treasure, torture-chambers or skeletons.”
~ Alain de Botton
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The causes of evil →
Look for the causes of the evil from which you suffer in yourself. Sometimes this evil is the direct consequence of your activity; Sometimes it happens after a lengthy period of transformation of an evil which you committed long ago. But the source is always in you, and salvation from it lies in changes in your actions, your way of life.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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A burden →
I have a burden on my soul. During all my long life, I did not make anyone happy, neither my friends, nor my family, nor even myself. I have done many evil things. […] I was the cause of the beginning of three big wars. About 800,000 people were killed because of me on the battlefields, and their mothers, brothers, and widows cried for them. And now this stands between me and god.
~ Otto von Bismarck
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Knowledge →
The title “scholar” suggests that a person has gone to school, and that he studied, but it does not mean that he has acquired any truly important knowledge.
~ George Lichtenberg
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Reward for virtue →
The reward for virtue is the understanding of the good deed.
~ Cicero
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Ignorance →
A precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation to, and accommodation with, the extent of one’s ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one’s inherent capacities.
~ Alain De Botton
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