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.
About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort. I am a humanist, which mean, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead.
If I say most people are pretty decent that may sound nice and warm but actually it's really radical and subversive and that's why, all throughout history, those who have advocated a more hopeful view of human nature - often the anarchists - have been persecuted.
The law is constantly based on notions of morality, and if all laws representing essentially moral choices are to be invalidated under the due process clause, the courts will be very busy indeed.
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.
Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that's how we've got to live.
I have always said that often the religion you were born with becomes more important to you as you see the universality of truth.
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