Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
Baltasar GracianRead
He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.
Interpretation
Living alone can reflect both the wisdom of a sage and the divinity of God, rather than the base instincts of animals.
This quote by Baltasar Gracian suggests that the ability to live alone places a person in a unique position of understanding and enlightenment. Rather than being compared to animals who rely on instinct and social structures, solitary individuals can possess the wisdom of sages and the profound nature of the divine, showing that solitude can lead to deeper insights and connections with humanity and spirituality.
In practice
This quote can be used at a philosophical discussion event focusing on the nature of individuality.
Help others solve their problems; standing farther away, you can often see matters more clearly than they do. . . The greatest service you can render someone else is helping him or her help themselves.
It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others.
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper understanding of ourselves and of the world, it is of the highest importance that this borderland should be thoroughly explored.
Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.
To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection: it is plunder.
We first observe facts, then generalise, and then draw conclusions or principles.
We know that we're not supposed to be racially biased, and we don't want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
All religions and cultures suffer from sources that preach hate against the 'other.' Throughout history some have, tragically, practiced what their sources preached, while some have sought to dismiss or even counteract the hateful words of their sources.
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