Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
Interpretation
Negative habits can have a lasting detrimental effect on a person's potential.
This quote suggests that when a person invests significant time in developing bad habits, it can lead to a decline in their personal growth and potential. The metaphor of being 'diminished' implies that the better aspects of their character and abilities can fade away, resulting in a loss of what they could have achieved in life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development, you might quote this to emphasize the importance of cultivating good habits.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
I'm interested in what motivates individuals to participate in atrocious acts to support their ideological identification.
He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.
Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.
Meditation is one of the ways in which the spiritual man keeps himself awake.
Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that; for it is true we may give advice, but we cannot give conduct.
We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy. (10)
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
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