Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.
Howard ThurmanRead
If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.
Interpretation
To maintain control over someone, one must know their triggers and weaknesses.
This quote by Howard Thurman emphasizes the importance of understanding how others can manipulate our emotions and reactions. By being aware of the things that upset us or cause us to lose composure, we become more vulnerable to control and subjugation. It suggests that emotional resilience and self-awareness are vital for personal empowerment and freedom from the influence of others.
In practice
During a leadership workshop to illustrate the importance of emotional intelligence.
Whatever may be the tensions and the stresses of a particular day, there is always lurking close at hand the trailing beauty of forgotten joy or unremembered peace.
What I have written is but a fleeting intimation of the outside of what one man sees and may tell about the path he walks. No one shares the secret of a life; no one enters into the heart of the mystery.
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive
What the world need is people who have come alive.
A bigot is a person who makes an idol of his commitments.
There must be always remaining in every life, some place for the singing of angels, some place for that which in itself is breathless and beautiful.
The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves - a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.
Insanity is in the eyes of the beholder. So I will continue to live my personal folly.
The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
Basically, it's hard for me to assess myself, a hardship not only prompted by the immodesty of the enterprise, but because one is not capable of assessing himself, let alone his work. However, if I were to summarize, my main interest is the nature of time. That's what interests me most of all. What time can do to a man.
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