Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
Seneca The YoungerRead
The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and, like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.
Interpretation
We often overlook the inner resources and blessings we possess while searching for happiness externally.
This quote by Seneca the Younger emphasizes the idea that true blessings and resources for fulfillment are inherent within us. However, many people fail to recognize these internal treasures as they search for satisfaction in the external world, often leading to frustration and disappointment.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to encourage people to look within for their strengths during a personal development seminar.
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley.
Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.
Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.
Loyalty is the holiest good in the human heart.
The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.
I am ready to be healed. I am willing to forgive. All is well.
I learned a lot from more experienced mountaineers, such as Peter Habeler, but by the time I was about 21 I reckoned I had learned all that I needed to make me technically self-sufficient anywhere.
Ideas are nothing. They're irrelevant. If you think your idea is so important, you're doomed. The reality is if you don't like one idea, I've got 299 more. If I tell you my idea, and you can execute better against that idea than I can - great; I get to play a terrific game.
Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.
Amusement should be used to do us good “like a medicine”: it must never be used as the food of the man...Many have had all holy thoughts and gracious resolutions stamped out by perpetual trifling. Pleasure so called is the murderer of thought. This is the age of excessive amusement: everybody craves for it, like a babe for its rattle.
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