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
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.
Interpretation
True mastery lies in using one's skills to serve those who would naturally dominate us.
This quote reflects the profound insight that the highest form of control or supremacy comes not from traditional means of power, but from the ability to serve and support those who possess inherent qualities that could make them our superiors. It suggests that by mastering a skill, one can elevate their status in a way that transforms the natural hierarchy, illustrating a deeper understanding of relationships and power dynamics in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about leadership, this quote can highlight the strength found in servitude.
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.
Advice is sometimes transmitted more successfully through a joke than grave teaching.
It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterwards.
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.
The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.
Never participate in the secrets of those above you; you think you share the fruit, and you share the stones - the confidence of a prince is not a grant, but a tax
A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
For in that universal call,_x000D_ _x000D_ Few bankers will to heaven be mounters;_x000D_ _x000D_ They'll cry, "Ye shops, upon us fall!_x000D_ _x000D_ Conceal and cover us, ye counters!_x000D_ _x000D_ When other hands the scales shall hold,_x000D_ _x000D_ And they, in men's and angels' sight_x000D_ _x000D_ Produced with all their bills and gold,_x000D_ _x000D_ 'Weigh'd in the balance and found light!'
Faced with having to change our views or prove that there is no need to do so, most of us immediately get busy on the proof.
There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.
One does what one is; one becomes what one does.
There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor.
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