“The difficulty is that we try to perfect others before we perfect ourselves.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 39 of 303
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them.”
“I've always thought it was arrogant to write about yourself, particularly when you're still alive.”
“Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”
“I'm inclined to reserve all judgement, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men.”
“Why must you speak your thoughts? Silence, if fair words stick in your throat, would serve all our ends better.”
“Children start out loving their parents, but as they grow older and discover their parents are human, they become judgmental. And sometimes, when they mature, they forgive their parents, especially when they discover they are also human.”
“Our minds are lazier than our bodies.”
“Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.”
“It's easier to criticize somebody else, than to see yourself.”
“Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.”
“Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?”
“I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”
“So let us begin anew - remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof”
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
“When virtues are pointed out first, flaws seem less insurmountable.”
“For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.”
“This is a hurried age we're living in. If you've got anything to say, say it quickly, get to the point and stop, and give the other man a chance to talk.”
“Be careful what you choose to do consciously, for unless your will is very strong, that is what you may have to do repeatedly and compulsively through the habit-influencing power of the subconscious mind.”
“I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better.”