Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
Interpretation
Negative habits can have a lasting detrimental effect on a person's potential.
This quote suggests that when a person invests significant time in developing bad habits, it can lead to a decline in their personal growth and potential. The metaphor of being 'diminished' implies that the better aspects of their character and abilities can fade away, resulting in a loss of what they could have achieved in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of cultivating good habits.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches-and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?
It's better to do your purpose imperfectly than to do someone else's purpose perfectly.
You have to kill a lot of trees before you write anything good.
Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting
It is easy to be pleasant when life flows by like a song, but the man worth while is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong. For the test of the heart is trouble, and it always comes with years, and the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through the tears.
The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret -- that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him.
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