Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.
Interpretation
Lying in bed allows you to reflect and identify what is truly important in life.
This quote emphasizes the value of reflection and discernment. When lying in bed late, one can take a moment to consider the significance of various thoughts and concerns, evaluating what truly demands attention and what is merely trivial. This state of contemplation helps prioritize one's actions based on genuine importance rather than being driven by distractions or pressures.
In practice
In a discussion about work-life balance, one might quote this to emphasize the need for reflection.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Despite the success cult, men are most deeply moved not by the reaching of the goal but by the grandness of the effort involved in getting there - or failing to get there.
You may call for peace as loudly as you wish, but where there is no brotherhood there can in the end be no peace.
When evil acts in the world it always manages to find instruments who believe that what they do is not evil but honorable.
Of the many things we have done to democracy in the past, the worst has been the indignity of taking it for granted.
The problem of freedom in America is that of maintaining a competition of ideas, and you do not achieve that by silencing one brand of idea.
nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.
One word of God can do more than ten thousand words of men to relieve a distressed soul.
Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses. 'It is time,’ he said, ‘for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.
Enlightenment is not an attainment; it is a realization. And when you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes. If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?
My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.
Muddled thinking inevitably results in muddled living
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