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
Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
Interpretation
It's preferable to share in the collective experiences of others, even if they seem irrational, than to be wise and isolated.
This quote suggests that engaging with the world, despite its flaws and madness, is more enriching than possessing wisdom in solitude. It advocates for the value of community and shared experiences, emphasizing that being part of the larger human experience, even in its chaos, brings greater fulfillment than solitary wisdom.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a discussion about the importance of participating in social movements.
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.
I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
It is true that we are called to create a better world. But we are first of all called to a more immediate and exalted task: that of creating our own lives.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.
In Trinidad, where as new arrivals we were a disadvantaged community, that excluding idea was a kind of protection; it enabled us - for the time being, and only for the time being - to live in our own way and according to our own rules, to live in our own fading India.
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning.
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