When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
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Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They read more
Thus we find that people who fail in everyday affairs show a tendency to reach out for the impossible. They become responsive to grandiose schemes, and will display unequaled steadfastness, formidable energies and a special fitness in the performance of tasks which would stump superior people. It seems paradoxical that defeat in dealing with the possible should embolden people to attempt the impossible, but a familiarity with the mentality of the weak reveals that what seems a path of daring is actually an easy way out: It is to escape the responsibility for failure that the weak so eagerly throw themselves into grandiose undertakings. For when we fail in attaining the impossible we are justified in attributing it to the magnitude of the task.
When the Greeks said, "Whom the gods love die young," they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored read more
When the Greeks said, "Whom the gods love die young," they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.
It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own read more
It is perhaps not entirely so, though it has often been said, that man makes his God in his own image. Rather does he create Him in the image of his cravings and dreams- in the image of what man wants to be. God making could be part of the process by which a society realizes its aspirations: it first embodies them in the conception of a particular God, and then proceeds to imitate that God. The confidence requisite for attempting the unprecedented is most effectively generated by the fiction that in realizing the new we are imitating rather than originating. Our preoccupation with heaven can be part of an effort to find precedents for the unprecedented.
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so read more
If you see in any given situation only what everybody else can see, you can be said to be so much a representative of your culture that you are a victim of it.
The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and read more
The world's greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professional chair offers no special opportunities.
If we do not believe in ourselves- neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness- the universe is a frightening read more
If we do not believe in ourselves- neither in our efficacy nor in our goodness- the universe is a frightening place.
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man read more
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?
Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.
