“When it is open to you, at any time you want, to retreat into yourself. No retreat offers someone more quiet and relaxation than that into his own mind.”

“‘It is my bad luck that this has happened to me.’ No, you should rather say: ‘It is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’”

“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”

“If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.”

“It is the gentle who have strength, sinew, and courage – not the indignant and complaining. The closer to control of emotion, the closer to power. Anger is as much a sign of weakness as is pain.”

“Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial.   All of this has afflicted them through their ignorance of true good and evil. But I have seen that the nature of good is what is right, and the nature of evil is what is wrong; and I have reflected that the nature of the offender is akin to my own – not a kinship of blood or seed, but a sharing of the same mind, the same fragment of divinity. Therefore I cannot be harmed by any of them, as none will infect me with their wrong. Nor can I be angry with my kinsmen or hate him. We were born for cooperation like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition.”

“Imagine you were now dead, or had not lived before his moment. Now view the rest of your life as a bonus, and live it as nature directs.”

related note: how awesome is this kid? kickass kiddo.

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 The first is staleness of imagery;the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it,or he inadvertently says something else,or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised,the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed:prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning,and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.