Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
James M. BarrieRead
Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them.
Interpretation
True strength comes not from passion but from the ability to control and overcome it.
This quote emphasizes that real strength is not merely a product of raw emotion or impulsive passion; rather, it is developed through the process of facing challenges and learning to manage those emotions effectively. It suggests that true resilience is found in the struggle against our inner impulses and the mastery over our feelings, leading to a more profound and stable form of strength.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development.
Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall.
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
It is easy to say something new, if all senses one will eschew. But hardly ever is found, that the new is also sound.
Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.
He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.
What else is there for me to conquer? Hopefully my ego. How will I know when I've succeeded? When I stop caring what anyone thinks.
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