A Quote by Samuel Johnson
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
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You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
The amount of love, kindness, patience I have for others is is directly proportional to how much love I have for myself, because we cannot give others what we ourselves do not have. And, unsurprisingly, the amount of love, respect, support, and compassion I receive from others is also in direct proportion to how much I love myself.
The reason we do not let our friends see the very bottom of our hearts is not so much distrust of them as distrust of ourselves.
Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself.
We receive mixed messages about taking good care of ourselves. Love thy neighbor as thyself means to love thyself and thy neighbor. Yet, self-love often is confused with selfishness and conceit. We are selfish when we do not love and accept ourselves, and attempt to take from others to fill the emptiness. Conceit indicates low self-worth and an attempt to conceal it. It is difficult to extend to others what you have not been able to give yourself. Take good care of yourself so you can care about the rest of us.
It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.
And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it.
There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.
A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.
To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others is neither better nor worse than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so.
To me it seems that to give happiness is a far nobler goal that to attain it: and that what we exist for is much more a matter of relations to others than a matter of individual progress: much more a matter of helping others to heaven than of getting there ourselves.
To exist is to be betrayed, since we exist for others only by virtue of what we betray of ourselves to them.
Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shrink neither.
The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
Throughout all of human history we've enjoyed certain benign circumstances: an envelope of atmosphere, an envelope of temperature. A kind of resilience that if you cut down trees, then they'll grow back. You take fish, they recover. You put stuff into the atmosphere that you know is not good for us, but we can still breathe. We haven't awakened, generally, to the sense of urgency that does exist.
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