None will improve your lot If you yourself do not.
Interpretation
Personal effort is essential for improvement; external help is insufficient.
Bertolt Brecht emphasizes the importance of taking personal responsibility for one's own progress and success. The quote suggests that without active participation and effort from the individual, no external factors or assistance will lead to meaningful change or improvement in one's circumstances.
In practice
In a motivational speech to students about taking control of their futures.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
Rebel children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.
Once you have commitment, you need the discipline and hard work to get you there.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Nothing can drag you down if you're not holding on to it.
I can accomplish far more than I have, and I will, for why would the miracle which produced me end with my birth? Why can I not extend that miracle to my deeds of today?
People of dua are optimistic by definition. They know that dua and thoughts like 'unlikely' or 'impossible' don't coexist.
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