We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.
Jean De La BruyereRead
When what you read elevates your mind and fills you with noble aspirations, look for no other rule by which to judge a book; it is good, and is the work of a master-hand.
Interpretation
A good book inspires and elevates your thoughts and aspirations, indicating its quality and mastery.
This quote emphasizes the profound effect that literature can have on a person's mind and spirit. When reading a book enriches your thoughts and stirs your noble aspirations, it serves as a definitive metric for its quality; such a book can be regarded as the product of a truly skilled author. It suggests that the emotional and intellectual uplift derived from reading is a hallmark of masterful writing.
In practice
This quote could inspire a book club discussion on the power of literature.
We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together.
We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice
False greatness is unsociable and remote: conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is. True greatness is free, kind, familiar and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.
From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.
Every man is valued in this world as he shows by his conduct that he wishes to be valued.
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
I'm not better than anyone, and I'm not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what's right. I'm trying to convince them to live by their own.
Investigate what is, and not what pleases.
Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.
Clean your finger before you point at my spots.
Think of these things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.
If you cast away one cross, you will certainly find another, and perhaps a heavier.
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