A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The extreme pleasure we take in speaking of ourselves should make us apprehensive that it gives hardly any to those who listen to us.
Related Quotes
The extreme delight we experience in talking about ourselves should warn us that those who listen do not share it.
When we fulfill any need of the human body, it gives us pleasure. To breathe gives us much pleasure.
The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily.
We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.
When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés moves us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.
Let us pray God, if He gives us any virtue or any gift, to keep it hidden even from ourselves, that we may preserve our humility, and not take occasion of pride because of it.
Why should we defend ourselves when we are misunderstood and misjudged? Let us leave that aside. Let us not say anything. It is so sweet to let others judge us in any way they like. O blessed silence, which gives so much peace to the soul!
Let us think today of the prospect of sharing in a sublime and blessed existence such as is portrayed in the text of the Apocalypse before us, and let us ask ourselves whether it should or should not make any difference in our present state of being.
In the face of events that threaten to overwhelm our lives, storytelling gives us a way of reclaiming ourselves and reaffirming our connections with other people-those who listen to our stories and, by doing so, bear witness with us.
We tend to think being hard on ourselves will make us strong. But it is cherishing ourselves that gives us strength
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.
To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
Be willing to take some risks in the areas of work and money. If we do only what we think we should do in order to make money and be secure, we won't listen to the intuitive voice that tells us to try something new, to be more creative, or to move on to the next step on our path. When we listen to our intuition and take some risks, we are not alone. The universe will support us and reward us for taking risks on its behalf!
You shouldn't listen to us at all if you're looking for information. We don't take ourselves seriously on any level; we're just comedians.
Just as love blinds us to imperfections in others, it magnifies those we see in ourselves. But if this is true, then the opposite must also be the case. We can take comfort in the fact that our faults will be invisible to those who love us. The success or failure of any relationship depends not just on how we feel about each other, but on how we make each other feel about ourselves.
Sigmund Freud already discovered that suffering gives us pleasure - in a strange masochistic way. The tyranny of choice exploits that weakness. Consumer culture exhausts us. We suffer. We destroy ourselves. And we just can't stop.
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