There is no point asserting and reasserting what the heart cannot believe.
Interpretation
One should not insist on beliefs that the heart does not accept.
This quote emphasizes the futility of insisting on beliefs or ideas that one cannot truly embrace emotionally. It suggests that understanding and acceptance at a deeper emotional level are essential for true belief, making the act of asserting those beliefs without genuine conviction meaningless.
In practice
In a discussion about personal beliefs, this quote could be used to illustrate the importance of genuine conviction.
At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good... Ideology - that is what gives devildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.
Today when we say the West we are already referring to the West and to Russia. We could use the word 'modernity' if we exclude Africa, and the Islamic world, and partially China.
To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.
Like a bicycle, like a wheel that, once rolling, is stable only so long as it keeps moving but falls when its momentum stops, so the game between a man and woman, once begun, can exist only so long as it progresses. If the forward movement today is no more than it was yesterday, the game is over.
It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.
I define power as 'control over one's life.' A balanced life is far superior to the male definition of power: earning money someone else spends while he dies sooner.
There should be a balance between material and spiritual progress, a balance achieved through the principles based on love and compassion.
Play is the exultation of the possible.
From nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
There is no worse sickness for the soul, o you who are proud, than this pretense of perfection.
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