A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
What often prevents our abandoning ourselves to a single vice is, our having more than one.
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We are more than we imagine ourselves to be. It's what we tell our children, our parents, our friends. But how often do we tell it to ourselves? And if we do, how often do we prove it? How often do we challenge ourselves to do something new?
What keeps us from abandoning ourselves entirely to one vice, often, is the fact that we have several.
Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.
Our business in life is not to get ahead of others but to get ahead of ourselves; to break our own records; to outstrip our yesterdays by our todays; to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could; to give as we never have given; to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever. This is the true idea: to get ahead of ourselves.
Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.
It may be true that encryption makes certain investigations of crime more difficult. It can close down certain investigative techniques or make it harder to get access to certain kinds of electronic evidence. But it also prevents crime by making our computers, our infrastructure, our medical records, our financial records, more robust against criminals. It prevents crime.
In the chapter on study we considered the importance of observing ourselves to see how often our speech is a frantic attempt to explain and justify our actions. Having seen this in ourselves, let's experiment with doing deeds without any words of explanation whatever. We note our sense of fear that people will misunderstand why we have done what we have done. We seek to allow God to be our justifier.
Somewhere we taught ourselves that our opinions are more significant than the facts. And somehow we get our egos and our opinions and Truth all mixed up in a single package, so that when something does challenge one of the notions to which we subscribe, we react as if it challenges us.
Often people become our friend or follower with an undercurrent of resentment in our having more success than they have. They secretly desire the opportunity to take us down a notch; they have a nose for any misstep on our part they can exploit.
We are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.
Nothing is more apt to deceive us than our own judgment of our work. We derive more benefit from having our faults pointed out by our enemies than from hearing the opinions of friends.
Constant reminding ourselves that we not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.
We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.
I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease.
We have to be part of something larger than ourselves, because our dreams are often bigger than our lifetimes.
We will never be more ourselves, with the fullness of our personality and the uniqueness of our gifting, than when we just wholly give ourselves over to our very faithful, faithful God.
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