Discipline is the highest of all virtues. Only so may strength and desire be counterbalanced and the endeavors of man bear fruit.
Interpretation
Discipline is crucial for achieving balance in life and realizing one's potential.
This quote emphasizes the importance of discipline as a foundational virtue that helps individuals balance their strengths and desires. Without discipline, one's efforts may not lead to meaningful results, while with it, personal endeavors can flourish and achieve success.
In practice
In a motivational speech about achieving personal goals.
A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.
This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.
What happiness this is: to fly, skimming over the earth just as we do in our dreams! Life has become a dream. Can this be the meaning of paradise?
I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I fight to embrace the entire circle of human activity to the full extent of my ability.
In the end I do respond to my own instincts. Sometimes they're successful, and obviously sometimes they're not. But you have to, I think, remain true to what you believe in.
Sometimes one must try anything, it is no disgrace. On the contrary, it is a sign of wisdom.
Negative results are just what I want. Theyβre just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that donβt.
If you call a thing bad you do little, if you call a thing good you do much
A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study.
You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
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