Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
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.
Interpretation
True fulfillment comes from the effort and journey rather than just the achievement itself.
Max Lerner's quote emphasizes the importance of the journey and the effort put into reaching goals, rather than focusing solely on the end result. It highlights that the experiences, challenges, and personal growth encountered during the pursuit of a goal are what leave a lasting impact on individuals, regardless of whether they achieve the goal or not.
In practice
In a motivational speech to encourage students during finals week.
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
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.
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.
Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make. It will not only improve your life, it will improve the lives of all those around you.
In our business, things look like a failure until they're not. It's pretty binary transitions.
I played in front of every conceivable audience you could face: an all-black audience, all-white, firemen's fairs, policemen's balls, in front of supermarkets, bar mitzvahs, weddings, drive-in theaters. I'd seen it all before I ever walked into a recording studio.
Great players never look in the mirror and think I'm a great basketball player. You ask yourself, Am I the best player I can be?
In the beginning I just wanted to survive. For the first three years, we made zero revenue. I remember many times when I was trying to pay up, the restaurant owner would say, 'Your bill was paid.' And there would be a note saying, 'Mr. Ma, I'm your customer on the Alibaba platform. I made a lot of money, and I know you don't, so I paid the bill.'
I want to thank the NBA and U.S.A. Basketball. Words can't describe my feeling. I was a small town kid from Hamburg, Arkansas, and you provided me a platform to live out my passion, the game of basketball, on the world's grandest stage.
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