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
You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote encourages individuality and self-reliance, suggesting one should not rely solely on external validation or trends.
Baltasar Gracian emphasizes the importance of independence in thought and action. By advocating for a detachment from single perspectives—whether they be influenced by a person's vote, societal trends, or the prevailing ideas of a particular era—Gracian suggests that true wisdom lies in cultivating one's unique identity and opinions, thereby fostering critical thinking and resilience against fleeting influences.
Themes
IndependenceIndividualityThoughtSelf-RelianceWisdom
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about self-identity and decision-making.
More from Baltasar Gracian
All quotes →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.
Baltasar GracianRead
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.
Baltasar GracianRead
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
Baltasar GracianRead
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.
Baltasar GracianRead
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
Baltasar GracianRead
Similar quotes
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat?
Chuck PalahniukRead
What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.
Neil GaimanRead
To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.
Miguel De CervantesRead
Our natural, inalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation from government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.
Ronald ReaganRead
At the beginning of my career, I visited a Sudanese refugee camp in Uganda and saw a two-year-old girl die before my eyes. The technical term for what this girl experienced, when you are too thin and malnourished for your size, is childhood wasting. And it was, indeed, a waste. A young life - with all its potential - gone forever.
Linda Thomas-GreenfieldRead
Am I motivated by what I really want out of life - or am I mass-motivated?
Earl NightingaleRead