Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
William HazlittRead
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
Interpretation
True greatness comes from personal merit rather than power held due to position or title.
This quote emphasizes the distinction between true greatness and the authority granted by one's position. Hazlitt suggests that being a king, while powerful, does not inherently make one a great individual; greatness stems from personal qualities and actions, not just from the power one wields due to their title.
In practice
During a leadership seminar about the responsibilities of power.
Pride is founded not on the sense of happiness, but on the sense of power.
The world loves to be amused by hollow professions, to be deceived by flattering appearances, to live in a state of hallucination; and can forgive everything but the plain, downright, simple, honest truth.
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
There are few things in which we deceive ourselves more than in the esteem we profess to entertain for our firends. It is little better than a piece of quackery. The truth is, we think of them as we please, that is, as they please or displease us.
Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.
To keep the heart then, is carefully to preserve it from sin which disorders it; and maintain that spiritual and gracious frame, which fits it for a life of communion with God.
In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along.
A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race [the Yankees]; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion. . . . A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, , etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.
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