A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

A man of understanding finds less difficulty in submitting to a wrong-headed fellow, than in attempting to set him right. — © Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A man of understanding finds less difficulty in submitting to a wrong-headed fellow, than in attempting to set him right.
If the underdog were always right, one might quite easily try to defend him. The trouble is that very often he is but obscurely right, sometimes only partially right, and often quite wrong; but perhaps he is never so altogether wrong and pig-headed and utterly reprehensible as he is represented to be by those who add the possession of prejudices to the other almost insuperable difficulties of understanding him.
What a great thing is understanding! It is priceless. No man can give greater pleasure to his fellow man than by understanding him.
Obviously, a man's judgement cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning processes, and make him something less than a man.
A well-trained mind has less difficulty in submitting to than in guiding an ill-trained mind.
Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.
Say less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a man's listening he isn't telling on himself and he's flattering the fellow who is.
If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.
THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky -journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self-worth.
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
I have often urged my young friends, when faced with an adversary, to "play polo" with him; i.e., not to go at him bald-headed but to ride side by side with him and gradually edge him off your track. Never lose your temper with him. If you are in the right there is no need to, if you are in the wrong you can't afford to.
I'm convinced, more than ever, that man finds liberation only when he binds himself to God and commits himself to his fellow man.
There?s no easier way to cure foolishness than to give a man leave to be foolish. And the only way to show a fellow that he?s chosen the wrong business is to let him try it.
When a man finds the one woman who is right, it scarcely matters what else is wrong.
He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not color'd like his own, and having pow'r T' enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
If I had to choose, I would always take the less dynamic, indeed even the lazy person who knows what's right than the zealot in the cause of error. He may move slower, but he's headed in the right direction.
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