So what exactly are the rewards of resentment. It is always a relief to know that the reason we have failed in life is not because we lack the talent, energy, or determination to succeed, but because of a factor that is beyond our control and that has loaded the dice decisively against us.
Interpretation
Resentment can provide a false sense of relief by attributing failure to external factors.
In this quote, Theodore Dalrymple discusses how resentment can serve as a psychological comfort, allowing individuals to blame their failures on uncontrollable external circumstances rather than on their own abilities or efforts. This perspective highlights the danger of attributing one’s lack of success to factors outside of one’s control, as it might momentarily relieve the emotional burden of failure but ultimately hinders personal growth and accountability.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
It is clear to me that people often want incompatible things. They want danger and excitement on the one hand, and safety and security on the other, and often simultaneously. Contradictory desires mean that life can never be wholly satisfying or without frustration.
Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.
The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. Only after death, only in solitude, does a man’s true nature emerge. In death, as on the chimney sweep’s Saturday night, the soot gets washed from his body.
There is a universal reality in ourselves that aligns us with a universal reality that is everywhere.
Imagine a multidimensiona l spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image.
Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods.
It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.
The cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.
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