A Quote by Alain de Botton
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.
Related Quotes
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
We must control the tendencies within our being that are destructive, when we want to slam somebody else, hurt them, injure them, or push them out of the way. A reverence for life needs to be developed, in which all things are sacred.
Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good?
I have found that the best cure for self pity is to do something to help someone else.
People are always pleased to indulge their religiosity when it allows them to stand in judgment of someone else, licenses them to feel superior to someone else, tells them they are more righteous than someone else. They are less enthusiastic when religiosity demands that they be compassionate to someone else. That they show charity, service and mercy to everyone else.
The best cure for hypochondria is to forget about your body and get interested in someone else's.
Good people cannot fully compensate for bad process, but they can mitigate some of its worst tendencies.
You suppose you are the trouble
But you are the cure
You suppose that you are the lock on the door
But you are the key that opens it
It's too bad that you want to be someone else
You don't see your own face, your own beauty
Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.
Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's beause it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
The best thing you can do for someone is make them a beautiful plate of food. How else can you invade someone's body without actually touching them?
The thing is, I never see my characters as psychopaths. I see them as really crippled victims who just happen to do bad things. And I never see them as bad guys; I see them as darker characters. I never see anything as good or bad; it's more light or dark, and the in-between is the grey.
In the frenzy, roller coaster of the season, you can play up and play down. But if you're strong enough, you can change those habits and tendencies and make them into championship-type habits and tendencies. That doesn't guarantee you that you're going to win, but it gives you the best chance. That's all I can ask for. That's all I want.
You never know where someone else is coming from. Even within best friendships or within mother- daughter relationships, you never fully know what's behind someone's eyes.
Words can never fully say what we want them to say, for they fumble, stammer, and break the best porcelain. The best one can hope for is to find along the way someone to share the path, content to walk in silence, for the heart communes best when it does not try to speak.
The Buddha’s principal message that day was that holding on to anything blocks wisdom. Any conclusion that we draw must be let go. The only way to fully understand the bodhichitta teachings, the only way to practice them fully, is to abide in the unconditional openness of the prajna, patiently cutting through all our tendencies to hang on.
People have more dimensions to them than we give them credit for. The person you meet on the street that you think is someone, and it's someone else. I'm mistaken for someone else all the time.
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