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
Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
If I was bound for hell, let it be hell. No more false heaven. No more damned magic.
Sannyas is the art of flying... the art that stops the process of gravitation and starts the process of grace. All that is needed is a state of let-go. All that is needed is a readiness to be possessed by the upward dimension, a readiness to open to the sky.
I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.
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