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.
In my entire life, any time I've ever lost something, I've gotten something even better going around the next corner. It's like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they're going to throw away, I know I can be fine.
Intelligence must follow faith, never precede it, and never destroy it.
If you are a strong man, very good! But do not curse others who are not strong enough for you. ...Everyone says, "Woe unto you people!!" Who says, "Woe unto me that I cannot help you?" The people are doing all right to the best of their ability and means and knowledge. Woe unto me that I cannot lift them to where I am!
Sometimes the simplest and best use of our will is to drop it all and just walk out from under everything that is covering us, even if only for an hour or soβjust walk out from under the webs we've spun, the tasks we've assumed, the problems we have to solve. They'll be there when we get back, and maybe some of them will fall apart without our worry to hold them up.
Our blossoms of passion, gay and luxuriant flowers, are bright and full of fragrance, but they beguile us and lead us astray, and their odor is deadly.
It is that the individual has within him or herself vast resources for self-understanding, for altering the self-concept basic attitudes, and his or her self-directed behavior - and that these resources can be tapped if only a definable climate of facilitative psychological attitudes can be provided
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