A Quote by Seneca the Younger
What madness it is for a man to starve himself to enrich his heir, and so turn a friend into an enemy! For his joy at your death will be proportioned to what you leave him.
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How much reverence has a noble man for his enemies!--and such reverence is a bridge to love.--For he desires his enemy for himself, as his mark of distinction; he can endure no other enemy than one in whom there is nothing to despise and very much to honor! In contrast to this, picture "the enemy" as the man of ressentiment conceives him--and here precisely is his deed, his creation: he has conceived "the evil enemy," "the Evil One," and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a "good one"--himself!
Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud. -Dylan Thomas
This sutra enjoins a rule of morality. It says nobody should be disrespected. A man can impress evdrybnody by his virtues. Disrespecting others means downfall of our own virtues. A person who disrespects others, in a way disrespect himself. A virtuous man does not disrespect his friend or vevn his enemy. Disrespect to enemy can investigate him toreact. The best thing is to destroy him completely. For a ruler this is very important.
The natural inclination of man is to rely solely upon himself and to ignore the purpose of his existence as well as his relationship to God who is his spiritual father. If man will recognize his divine origin, he will then realize his Heavenly Father will not leave him alone to grope in darkness of mind and spirit, but will make available a power to influence him in right paths and into standards of good behavior. The Holy Ghost is that power.
When a friend, then, indulges in the joy unburdening a secret on to another friend's bosom, he makes the latter, in his turn, feel the urge to taste the same joy himself.
When any man accumulates more than he can earn with his own hands, he begins to enrich himself at the expense of the youth, the sweat, the blood, the joy of his fellow men.
You must never call your enemy by a name you choose for him." “Instead you must call him by the name he calls himself. What he chooses will reflect his pride; it will reveal his desires. But what you choose to call him will reveal your fears, which should be kept to yourself, lest your enemy find the way to exploit them.
Let a man choose what condition he will, and let him accumulate around him all the goods and gratifications seemingly calculated to make him happy in it; if that man is left at any time without occupation or amusement, and reflects on what he is, the meagre, languid felicity of his present lot will not bear him up. He will turn necessarily to gloomy anticipations of the future; and unless his occupation calls him out of himself, he is inevitably wretched.
To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.
But a man's best friend is the one who not only wishes him well but wishes it for his own sake (even though nobody will ever know it): and this condition is best fulfilled by his attitude towards himself - and similarly with all the other attributes that go to define a friend. For we have said before that all friendly feelings for others are extensions of a man's feelings for himself.
A man who gives way to his passions is like a man who is shot by an enemy, catches the arrow in his hands, and then plunges it into his own heart. A man who is resisting his passions is like a man who is shot by an enemy, and although the arrow hits him, it does not seriously wound him because he is wearing a breastplate. But the man who is uprooting his passions is like a man who is shot by an enemy, but who strikes the arrow and shatters it or turns it back into his enemies heart.
Anytime you tell a man to turn the other cheek or to be nonviolent in the face of a violent enemy, you're making that man defenseless. You're robbing him of his God-given right to defend himself.
The man who has given himself to his country loves it better; the man who has fought for his friend honors him more; the man who has labored for his community values more highly the interests he has sought to conserve; the man who has wrought and planned and endured for the accomplishment of God's plan in the world sees the greatness of it, the divinity and glory of it, and is himself more perfectly assimilated to it.
The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that good-will I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small.
Death is my son-in-law. Death is my heir. My daughter he hath wedded. I will die, And leave him all. Life, living, all is Death’s.
No man can expect to find a friend without faults; nor can he propose himself to be so to another. Without reciprocal mildness and temperance there can be no continuance of friendship. Every man will have something to do for his friend, and something to bear with in him. The sober man only can do the first; and for the latter, patience is requisite. It is better for a man to depend on himself, than to be annoyed with either a madman or a fool.
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