Right Attitudes

Inspirational Quotations by Carlos Castaneda (#664)

December 25, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Today marks the birthday of Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998,) a controversial American New Age icon. His 12 books sold 8 million copies in 17 languages before his death, and even more since.

Castaneda gained rapid celebrity during graduate school after his The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) became a best-seller in the late sixties. This and his other books describe the mystical drug-stimulated escapades he claimed he had with his mentor Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer whom Castaneda supposedly met in 1960 while studying medicinal plants used by American Indians.

Castaneda’s writings are as mysterious as the details of his life and death. Though records proved that he was born in Peru, he claimed he was born in Brazil. Despite his fame and notoriety, he refused to be photographed, tape-recorded, or interviewed. His death was disclosed only after two months.

Citing contradictions, factual discrepancies, and the fact that Don Juan could never be traced, critics argue that Castaneda’s books are works of fiction and not based on anthropological fieldwork.

Although Castaneda’s writings were not intended to be self-help books, his followers enthusiastically interpreted them as offering a practical philosophy of living and a set of life-improvement practices.

Inspirational Quotations by Carlos Castaneda

All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. However, a path without a heart is never enjoyable. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy—it does not make a warrior work at liking it; it makes for a joyful journey; as long as a man follows it, he is one with it.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever must be learned must be learned the hard way.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

No person is important enough to make me angry.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

The only thing we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The counter-measure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

We talk to ourselves incessantly about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. And whenever we finish talking to ourselves about ourselves and our world, the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we rekindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die. A warrior is aware of this and strives to stop his internal talk.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

Learn to see, and then you’ll know that there is no end to the new worlds of our vision.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

When a man has fulfilled all four of these requisites—to be wide awake, to have fear, respect, and absolute assurance—there are no mistakes for which he will have to account; under such conditions his actions lose the blundering quality of the acts of a fool. If such a man fails, or suffers a defeat, he will have lost only a battle, and there will be no pitiful regrets over that.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

It doesn’t matter how one was brought up. What determines the way one does anything is personal power.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

An average man is too concerned with liking people or with being liked himself. A warrior likes, that’s all. He likes whatever or whomever he wants, for the hell of it.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat the world as it is: a sheer mystery.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

Legendary Primatologist Jane Goodall on Spirituality

December 23, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

Preamble: This is the first in a series of articles I wish to publish on the religiosity of prominent scientists. See my previous article on why it pays understand religion and appreciate religious beliefs (or lack thereof) other than one’s own.

British ethnologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, which promotes wildlife conservation and research, and a United Nations Messenger of Peace. As the world’s foremost primatologist and expert on chimpanzees, Jane Goodall observed Tanzanian apes for over 50 years and revolutionized mankind’s knowledge of chimpanzee behavior. Goodall has redefined our understanding of what makes humans distinct from animals.

Jane Goodall’s religious sensibilities favor the mystical. She is attributed with, “Thinking back over my life, it seems to me that there are different ways of looking out and trying to understand the world around us. There’s a very clear scientific window. And it does enable us to understand an awful lot about what’s out there. There’s another window; it’s the window through which the wise men, the holy men, the masters of the different and great religions look as they try to understand the meaning in the world. My own preference is the window of the mystic.”

In the May-2008 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, Jane Goodall discussed her spirituality: “amazing moments—when you seem to know something beyond what you know and to understand things you don’t understand—can’t be understood in this life.”

When asked if she believes in God in an interview published in the Sep-2010 issue of Reader’s Digest, Jane Goodall said,

I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.

Jane Goodall is a dedicated vegetarian and advocates the vegetarian diet for ethical, environmental, and health reasons.

Farm animals are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined and, despite having been bred as domestic slaves, they are individual beings in their own right. As such, they deserve our respect. And our help. Who will plead for them if we are silent? Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been treated so with little respect and kindness just to make more meat.

In ‘Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,’ Jane Goodall tracks her ambitions and accomplishments as one of the world’s foremost primatologist to her childhood roots, tenderly inviting young readers to follow in her spiritual footsteps. In the first chapter, she writes:

I do not want to discuss evolution in [depth], only touch on it from my own perspective: from the moment when I stood on the Serengeti plains holding the fossilized bones of ancient creatures in my hands to the moment when, staring into the eyes of a chimpanzee, I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back. You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves. How should the mind that can contemplate God relate to our fellow beings, the other life-forms of the world? What is our human responsibility? And what, ultimately, is our human destiny?

It Pays to Understand Religion

December 20, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Religion Plays a Major Role in Shaping Humanity

All along the arc of humankind, religion has controlled and transformed existence. It continues to arouse passion, inspire crusades, instigate controversy, and arbitrate values.

Whether you are deeply religious, an ecumenical, a nonbeliever, or hold indifference towards organized religion, it pays to understand religion, mysticism, and spirituality. Here’s why: a well-informed understanding of humanity entails an appreciation of the role that religion plays in shaping ideas, worldviews, and events that have an impact not only on the political, economic, social, and cultural memes of the collective but also on the attitudes and behaviors of the individual.

Furthermore, appreciating religious beliefs other than one’s own is a key element of wisdom, open-mindedness, and tolerance.

Religiosity of Scientists

Given the shifting relationship between religion and science, I’ve always been fascinated by the religious and spiritual opinions of scientists.

The collective perception of the interplay between religion and science has changed significantly over time, especially since the 16th century when Francis Bacon pioneered experimental science and unleashed the intellectual development of the scientific discipline. Francis, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, and other titans interconnected their science with their Christian faiths. Present-day scientists such as physicist Stephen Hawking (who is “not religious in the normal sense”) have offered alternative rationalizations of spirituality. Astrophysicist Carl Sagan and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (who said, “not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science”) have aggressively criticized conventional religions.

I shall publish a series of articles where I gather views that prominent scientists hold on faith, God, and their religiosity. On Friday, I’ll feature Jane Goodall, the leading primatologist.

Inspirational Quotations #663

December 18, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.
—Khalil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

Anything that we have to learn we learn by the actual doing of it… we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

There is much suffering in the world—physical, material, mental. The suffering of some can be blamed on the greed of others. The material and physical suffering is suffering from hunger, from homelessness, from all kinds of diseases. But the greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, having no one. I have come more and more to realize that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.
—Mother Teresa (Albanian Catholic Humanitarian)

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow men.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)

The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them.
—Kimon Nicolaides

Make not the sauce till you have caught the fish.
—Common Proverb

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man’s mind.
—Leonardo da Vinci (Italian Polymath)

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
—Michel de Montaigne (French Philosopher)

The merit of charitable works is in proportion to the grace with which they are practiced.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

How to Increase Your Likeability: The 10/5 Rule

December 16, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The 10/5 Rule, also known as the “Zone of Hospitality Rule,” is a well-known guiding principle for extending courtesy to customers in the hospitality, healthcare, retail, and other service industries. The rule instructs,

Whenever a staff member is within ten feet of a guest, the staff member must make eye contact and smile to greet the approaching guest.
When a staff member is within five feet of a guest, the staff member must also look the guest in the eye and acknowledge him/her with a salutation such as “Hello” or “Good Morning, Mrs. Smith.”

Many companies have adapted versions of the 10/5 Rule to improve friendliness, customer-service, and responsiveness. As I’ve written in a previous article, Walmart’s iconic founder Sam Walton instituted the ‘Ten-Foot Attitude’ and said, “… I want you to promise that whenever you come within 10 feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him, and ask him if you can help him.” At Disney theme parks, “cast members” are encouraged to make eye contact, smile, greet, and welcome each guest as part of Disney’s famous “Seven Service Guidelines.”

Courtesy is an Influence Technique

As expounded in Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help book How to Win Friends & Influence People, we are much more likely to feel warmly toward any person who sincerely makes us feel good about ourselves.

Likeable people not only succeed in their personal relationships, but also tend to be more successful at the workplace. Indeed, highly competent but unlikeable employees do not thrive as well as their moderately competent but more likeable peers.

Idea for Impact: Be courteous. Even simple acts of courtesy (making eye contact, smiling more, listening, showing sincere interest in others, for example) work as an influence technique because folks are much more likely to do things for—and accede to requests from—people they perceive as likeable.

The More You Believe in Yourself, the Less You Need Others to Do It for You

December 13, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If you’re like most people including me, you struggle with criticism. You find criticism harsh and unhelpful because criticism strikes at the very conflict between two deep-seated human desires—the desire to be accepted just the way you are and the desire to learn and grow. Consequently, even a nonthreatening comment can leave you feeling uneasy, irritated, angry, and vulnerable.

The More You Believe in Yourself, the Less You Need Others to Do It for You Your sensitivity for disapproval is often justified. Your detractors aren’t perhaps thinking straight. When they pass judgments about you, their critical pronouncements often reveal a great deal about themselves and little about you. Psychologists contend that critics, in offering their disapprovals, are subconsciously projecting their own insecurities, pessimism, and fears onto you.

Most people are driven by emotions and not hard evidence. They tend to impulsively estimate your merits, instead of evaluating you thoughtfully. Therefore, when you confront those inevitable disapprovals, disappointments, and setbacks, don’t pity yourself and feel sorry for the conditions you face in life. Don’t get hung up on waiting for others to give you positive strokes. Give yourself gratitude for your efforts, and choose to get back up, dust yourself off, and move on.

Life isn’t easy for anyone. But it could be made easier by valuing yourself when you confront adversity, hardships, and disapprovals. As the Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote about the art of forbearance in Meditations (trans. A.S.L. Farquharson,)

Remind yourself of the kinds of things you have passed through and the kinds you have had strength to endure; that the story of life is written and your service accomplished. How many beautiful things have been revealed, how many pleasures and pains you have looked down upon, how many ambitions ignored, to how many unkind persons you have been kind!

Coaching, feedback, advice, criticisms, and comments are great tools that can help you learn and grow, but only when they come from the right people—benevolent people who are knowledgeable, understanding, supportive, and, most importantly, have your best interests at heart. When they come from others, the best response is to listen, mull them over objectivity (Was the criticism offered in good faith? Was the criticism true?), and disregard them if they don’t seem justified.

Idea for Impact: When people try to tell you who you are, consider them with a grain of salt. You are the sole curator, guardian, and defender of your integrity and your sense of self-worth. So, don’t sweat when others think less than you actually are. Care less for what other people think. Believe in yourself.

Inspirational Quotations #662

December 11, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—Galileo Galilei (Italian Astronomer)

It is not how much one makes but to what purpose one spends.
—John Ruskin (English Art Critic)

It’s one thing to dream, but when the moment is right, you’ve got to be willing to leave what’s familiar and go out to find your own sound.
—Howard Schultz (American Businessman)

Revenge is the abject pleasure of an abject mind.
—Juvenal (Roman Poet)

The jests of the rich are ever successful.
—Oliver Goldsmith (Irish Author)

Court not the critic’s smile nor dread his frown.
—Walter Scott (Scottish Novelist)

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

Wisdom begins in wonder.
—Socrates (Anceient Greek Philosopher)

A person should set his goals as early as he can and devote all his energy and talent to getting there. With enough effort, he may achieve it. Or he may find something that is even more rewarding. But in the end, no matter what the outcome, he will know he has been alive.
—Walt Disney (American Entrepreneur)

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American First Lady)

The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

What you cannot see in the world is far more powerful than anything you can see.
—T. Harv Eker (American Motivational Speaker)

He gives little who gives with a frown; he gives much who gives little with a smile.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

Three things produce love: culture of mind, modesty, and meekness.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

8 Effective Ways to De-Stress This Holiday Season

December 9, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

‘Tis the season to feel harried.

The “most wonderful time of the year” can present plenty of reasons to be anxious and stressed—even depressed—during an occasion meant for cheerfulness and celebration.

According to this American Psychological Association survey, 44 percent of women and 31 percent of men reported an increase in stress during the holidays. 59 percent of respondents testified to feeling nervous or sad, and 51 percent reported symptoms of fatigue.

Here are some practical tips to help you minimize the stress that may accompany your holidays.

Plan ahead and take control of the holidays. Don’t let the holidays become something you dread. Look back at prior years and identify your holiday triggers (cranky relatives, gifts, financial pressures, and end-of-the-year demands at work, etc.) so that you can combat them before they lead to a meltdown. A little planning and positive thinking can go a long way in helping you find peace and joy during the holidays.
Get organized. Put first things first. Don’t get engulfed with demands and expectations. Establish relaxing surroundings. Commence each day by writing down whatever is most important for you to accomplish that day. Make decisions quickly and act upon them.
Be realistic and don’t pursue perfection. You are only one person—you can only do so much! Let go of your vision of a picture-perfect holiday. Be pragmatic about what you expect of yourself and others. Establish priorities, avoid procrastination, and let go of impossible goals. Relax and enjoy the companionship of family and friends.
Take frequent breaks. When frazzled, take a nap, go for a short walk, read a book, or watch a funny movie.
Try adult coloring books. Studies have shown that coloring within lines inspires mindfulness—being in the present moment instead of in the past (associated with depression) or in the future (associated with anxiety.) Coloring books can set you in a relaxed, absorbed, meditative state and help you reduce anxiety, depression, and fatigue.
Say ‘no’ generously. You don’t have to attend every holiday party you’re invited to—it’s OK to say ‘no’ to a few or all of them. Don’t skip the office holiday party, however—it’s a great opportunity to “get noticed.” Don’t overcommit yourself.
Meditate, if even for a few minutes. Sitting for just a few minutes of meditation can be an incredible sanctuary of calm and relaxation that you’ll seldom find during the holiday season. Meditation is known to reduce the stress hormone cortisol, strengthen the immune system, and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Take time out of the day to lower your stress levels and focus on your well-being.
Maintain healthy eating and exercise habits. The holiday season is notorious for ruining healthy habits and adding a few extra pounds to waistlines. Fend off holiday weight gain by being mindful of what you eat and regulating portion sizes. Avoid starving yourself in anticipation of eating at holiday parties. Instead, consume some nourishing snacks to fill you up before dinner parties. Try simple, small workouts each day. Maintain a food and workout journal to help you stay committed to your health goals.

Idea for Impact: This holiday season, your needs belong to the top

When demands for your time intensify during the holiday season, you need to do more for yourself—not less.

In spite of everything, the holidays are less about gatherings, grub, and gifts—and more about finding peace and serenity for yourself and sharing it with your loved ones.

Happy holidays everyone!

How to Boost Your Willpower // Book Summary of Baumeister & Tierney’s ‘Willpower’

December 6, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

In previous articles, I have discussed a key differentiating trait I’ve observed in successful people: they get things done not by pursuing motivation but through discipline, self-control, determination, and willpower. They actively seek a way to work at whatever must be done even when they do not really feel like doing it.

In Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (2011,) New York Times science writer John Tierney and Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister discuss the virtues of self-control, and the concepts of ego depletion and decision fatigue. This informative tome is grounded in thirty years of academic research into willfulness and self-discipline.

Willpower starts with the assertion that intelligence and willpower are your two best predictors of achieving success in life. You may not be able to meaningfully increase your intelligence, but you can surely enhance your capacity for self-control. Parenthetically, when people were inquired about their failings in life, a lack of self-control was consistently at the top of the list.

The book’s central theorem is the much-debated “strength model of self-control.” This “muscle metaphor” states that willpower is like a muscle that tires out—or runs out of energy—as you use it, but can be fortified through practice.

How to Boost Your Willpower

Here are some prominent insights and tips from Willpower:

You have a limited amount of willpower, which, in the short term, depletes as you use it and must be replenished. Each instance of applying willpower (e.g. repressing your thoughts and actions, working intensely, stressing at work, making decisions, and dealing with difficult people) drains the same psychological reservoir of self-control. Expending willpower in one sphere of life leaves you less able to exercise self-control in another.
Just as muscles can get overworked and become tired and feeble until they can recuperate, the exercise of self-control causes fatigue.
Willpower is fuelled by blood glucose. Therefore, acts of self-control drain the glucose. When glucose is low, self-control failures are more likely. Restoring glucose to a sufficient level usually improves self-control. Willpower can be restored by boosting blood sugar. Foods like white bread, potatoes, white rice, and sugared snacks cause boom-and-bust cycles of willpower since these foods are quickly converted into glucose. Vegetables, nuts, raw fruits, and cheese are converted more slowly, and therefore provide ‘fuel’ more progressively.
Being in a tidy room seems to increase self-control and being in a messy room seems to curb self-control.
Your daily supply of willpower is limited. If you exhaust most of your willpower during the day at work, you will have less self-control, tolerance, and imperturbability when you come home to family. Many marriages go bad when stress at work is at its worst: people use up all their willpower on the job; their home lives suffer because they gave much to their work.
When your willpower is low, you’ll find it more arduous to make tougher decisions. Moreover, during decision-making, you’ll be more reluctant to eliminate some of the options you could choose from.
In the long term, practicing willpower strengthens it, just as a muscle develops stamina and power when consistently exercised. Even small, inconsequential acts of self-control—avoiding slouching, for example—can strengthen your capacity for self-discipline in the long term.
When you resist one temptation but cannot resist another, your egos have been fatigued by the exercise of willpower. Conversely, you can resist temptations across the board when your ego has been strengthened by exercise.
Stress instigates many negative emotions because stress depletes willpower, which consequently diminishes your ability to control and overcome those negative emotions.
The best use of willpower is in setting priorities and getting things done. Given you have a limited amount of willpower on a given day, you’re best served by budgeting your willpower and spending it where and when you need it the most.
Clear, attainable goals combined with rewards strengthen willpower. Monitoring goals and committing yourself publicly to your goals can help you counteract weakness of will.
Live as much of your life as possible on an autopilot. Eliminate distractions, temptations, and unnecessary choices. Simplify. Develop routines and cultivate habits that you can eventually do robotically.
Organize your life to decrease the need for willpower. Conserve willpower for demanding circumstances.

Recommendation: Read Willpower. This New York Times best seller is filled with guidance about how best to deploy willpower to overcome temptation and how to build up your willpower ‘strength’ with small—but regular and methodical—exercises. Even if somewhat academic for a self-help book, this worthwhile volume is filled with resourceful research, practical advice, and enthralling stories of people who’ve achieved personal transformation owing to the strength of their will.

Inspirational Quotations by Thomas Carlyle (#661)

December 4, 2016 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Today marks the birthday of Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881,) the great-yet-controversial Scottish historian, philosopher, and essayist from the Victorian era.

Known for his incisive critique of British society, Carlyle was one of the most significant thinkers of the nineteenth century. However, since the early 1900s, his work has been censured for his belief that powerful, heroic individuals can transform the course of humanity and for his veneration of the Germanic spirit—both of which invigorated Nazi ideologues.

Carlyle studied and translated German literature in his early years. Some of his earliest writings describe a polarity between the “sacrificial seriousness” of the German culture and the “superficial, pleasure-seeking” British culture. In Signs of the Times (1829), he described the chasm between the material advancements of the machine age and the soulless mediocrity of “modern man.”

Carlyle’s first truly successful book was the three-volume The French Revolution (1837.) Legend has it that after months of hard work, Carlyle lent his completed manuscript of the first volume to his friend, the political philosopher John Stuart Mill. A friend of Mill read the manuscript and left the pages in an untidy heap at his home. Mill’s maid mistook it for trash and threw it in the fire. Carlyle refused to let the loss get him down and rewrote it after finishing the second and third volumes. The French Revolution became one of his most respected works and is considered a reliable account of the early course of the Revolution. Charles Dickens referred to it while writing his A Tale of Two Cities (1859.)

At the core of Carlyle’s political philosophy was his attribution of all historical progress solely to mighty heroes who served as role models for how people should live. He wrote, “No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” He expounded these beliefs in The French Revolution, On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), and History of Frederick the Great (1858–1865, 6 volumes.) These books profoundly influenced German and Italian fascism and painted Carlyle as a progenitor of the concept of totalitarian regimes.

Inspirational Quotations by Thomas Carlyle

There are depths in man that go to the lowest hell, and heights that reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, everlasting miracle and mystery that he is.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man’s life.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The depth of our despair measures what capability and height of claim we have to hope.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Everywhere in life the true question is, not what we have gained, but what we do.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that fortune’s inequality exhibits under this sun.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

A man’s honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken off, and left behind us,—a business often of enormous difficulty.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Misery which, through long ages, had no spokesman, no helper, will now be its own helper and speak for itself.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The man of Humor sees common life, even mean life, under the new light of sportfulness and love; whatever has existence has a charm for him. Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

A great man shows his greatness by the way he treats little men.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Enjoying things which are pleasant; that is not the evil: it is the reducing of our moral self to slavery by them that is.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

All human things do require to have an ideal in them; to have some soul in them.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Today is not yesterday.—We ourselves change.—How then, can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same.—Change, indeed, is painful, yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

There is endless merit in a man’s knowing when to have done.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The wealth of man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Tell a person they are brave and you help them become so.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

All work, even cotton spinning, is noble; work is alone noble … A life of ease is not for any man, nor for any god.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Experience is the best of schoolmasters, only the school fees are heavy.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Only the person of worth can recognize the worth in others.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something. The strongest, by dispensing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Our grand business undoubtedly is, not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

In every man’s writings, the character of the writer must lie recorded.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

What you see, yet can not see over, is as good as infinite.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

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