Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
Walter BagehotRead
Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life involves balancing personal desires, learned wisdom, and emotional limitations.
This quote by Walter Bagehot highlights the complexities of navigating life, where individuals often find themselves at the crossroads of their ego's desires, the guidance of past experiences, and the constraints imposed by their feelings of fear or anxiety. It suggests that living successfully requires a compromise among these competing forces, ultimately shaping our decisions and actions in the world.
Themes
LifeEgoExperienceNervesCompromiseDecisionsBalance
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges in life.
More from Walter Bagehot
All quotes →It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter BagehotRead
War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.
Walter BagehotRead
Efficiency in an assembly requires a solid mass of steady votes; and these are collected by a deferential attachment to particular men, or by a belief in the principles that those men represent, and they are maintained by fear of those men - by the fear that if you vote against them, you may soon yourself have no vote at all.
Walter BagehotRead
The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter BagehotRead
Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone: but what we have requires no proof.
Walter BagehotRead
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