Emotions and Feelings

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.

Humility is often only a feigned submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within.

A great Hope fell You heard no noise The Ruin was within.

To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself.

Whoe’er excels in what we prize, Appears a hero in our eyes.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

We all look for happiness, but without knowing where to find it: like drunkards who look for their house, knowing dimly that they have one.