The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life. They try to realize this desire either by finding a new identity or by blurring and camouflaging their individual distinctness; and both these ends are reached by imitation.
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Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a read more
The continuous disasters of man's history are mainly due to his excessive capacity and urge to become identified with a tribe, nation, church or cause, and to espouse its credo uncritically and enthusiastically, even if its tenets are contrary to reason, devoid of self-interest and detrimental to the claims of self-preservation.We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that read more
The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.
Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
Good means not merely not to do wrong, but rather not to desire to do wrong.
If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, read more
If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything in to read more
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything in to an empty head.
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a read more
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin read more
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
