CHARACTER

What It Is

So, the next stop in figuring out the whole "character" thing?

We figured, check with every single one of the smartest people in the history of mankind, gather in one place and summarize exactly what they have said on the matter from the dawn of time to the present.

Then we realized that was really going to be a whole, whole lot of work, so we decided to look up as many people as we could and report it here.

Here is a sample of what we've found so far.

Talk about it:
info@LiveReal.com

Defining it:
So, what is "character"?

"I have often thought that the best way
to define a man's character would be
to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude
in which, when it came upon him,
he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive.
At such moments there is a voice inside
which speaks and says:
'This is the real me!'"
- William James

"In order to have something,
you must first be something."
- Goethe

"What you are speaks so loudly,
I cannot hear what you say."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"As a man is, so he sees."
- William Blake

"Are you good men and true?"
- William Shakespeare

"If there is righteousness in the heart,
there will be beauty in the character.
If there is beauty in the character,
there will be harmony in the home.
If there is harmony in the home,
there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation,
there will be peace in the world."
- Proverb from Confucianism

"What is character
but the determination of incident?
What is incident
but the illustration of character?"
- Henry James

"Character is higher than intellect."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A man's character is his fate."
- Heraclitus

"Becoming"

What's the difference, say, between a person who gets angry, and "an angry person"? A person who is successful, and a "winner"? A person who loses sometimes, and a "loser"? A person plays, and is "a Player"? A person who does good things, and a "good person"?

There seems to be something interesting about the way a person's personality evolves over time that isn't easy to pin down. There seems to be a constellation of qualities that congregate around a person, according to how they live their life; a gradual accumulation, a summation of the choices, decisions, and circumstances a person has been involved in.

A moth lands on a tree covered with white moss; the moth turns white. A lawyer goes to school, hangs out with lawyers, thinks like a lawyer, acts like a lawyer . . . "becomes" a lawyer. A student wants to be a doctor - goes to school with doctors, reads books by doctors, hangs out with doctors, learns to think like a doctor, acts like a doctor . . . and eventually, becomes a doctor. Say a person sets out to make a million dollars: they work hard for several decades, and eventually make the million - but during the time, they have become so consumed with thoughts of ambition and money, they have a hard time enjoying it.

In some ways, certain traits can become an identity.

"Work to become,
not to acquire."
- Unknown

"We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then,
is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

"We sow a thought and reap an act;
we sow an act and reap a habit;
we sow a habit and reap a character;
we sow a character and reap a destiny."
- William Thackeray

"We are what we think;
as we desire so do we become!
By our thoughts, desires, and habits,
we either ascend to the full divine dignity of our nature,
or we descend to suffer and learn."
- J.Todd Ferrier

"The intelligent man, examining himself,
determines what is appropriate and profitable to him,
what is proper and beneficial to the soul, and what is foreign to it.
Thus he avoids what is foreign and harmful to the soul and cuts him off from immortality."
- St. Antony the Great

"How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing,
when the one thing needful for a man is to become -
to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Something in our control

Whenever the word "character" comes up, it usually happens in one of two contexts: it either refers to the way a person is, or it refers to the way a person develops or should become, as in "building character."

The debate has raged on for centuries about "why we are the way we are": we're born with a certain disposition, we inherit various traits and qualities, we are subjected to forces that influence and affect us, and many things in life, even close to ourselves, are out of our control.

Still, one thing that almost all agree on, however, is that regardless of whatever influences may have determined who we are to this point, we still govern an ability of choice, of indeterminancy, or freedom, which to whatever degree, puts our lives and fate into our own hands.

"We have to believe in free will.
We've got no choice."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer

"Carpenters bend wood;
fletchers bend arrows;
wise men fashion themselves."
- The Buddha

"Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own."
- Shakespeare

"Every man stamps his value on himself...
man is made great or small by his own will."
- J.C.F. von Schiller

"The difference between great people and everyone else
is that great people create their lives actively,
while everyone else is created by their lives,
passively waiting to see where life takes them next.
The difference between the two
is the difference between living fully and just existing."
- Michael Gerber

"The 'unfree will' is mythology;
in real life it is only a matter
of strong and weak wills."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"He who thinks freedom
leaves him free to be undisciplined
is a fool."
- Paul Brunton

"Every man stamps his value on himself . . .
man is made great or small by his own will."
- J.C.F. von Schiller

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will."
- William Shakespeare

"Will is to grace
as the horse is to the rider."
- Saint Augustine

"Let him that would move the world,
first move himself."
- Socrates

Purpose

It seems that a big aspect of "character" comes down to the question,
"What are you doing with your life?"

"If a man hasn't discovered something
that he will die for,
he isn't fit to live."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"And do thy duty, even if it be humble,
rather than another's, even if it be great.
To die in one's duty is life: to live in another's is death."
- The Bhagavad Gita

"Restfulness is a quality for cattle;
the virtue are all active, life is alert."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge."
- Dante Alighieri

"Iron rusts from disuse;
stagnant water loses its purity
and in cold weather becomes frozen;
even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind."
- Leonardo da Vinci

"No athlete is crowned
but in the sweat of his brow."
- Saint Jerome

"Work keeps us from three great evils:
boredom, vice, and poverty."
- Voltaire

"There was a need for one who could show
that a heroic life was still possible in the modern world . . ."
- Walter Kauffman on Nietzsche

"At daybreak, when you loathe the idea of leaving your bed,
have this thought ready in your mind:
'I am rising for the work of man.'
Should I have misgivings about doing that for which I was born,
and for the sake of which I came into this world?
Is this the grand purpose of my existence:
to lie here snug and warm underneath my blankets?
- 'Certainly it feels more pleasant' -
Was it for pleasure that you were made,
and not for work, nor for effort?
Look at the plants, sparrows, ants, spiders, and bees,
all working busily away
each doing its part in welding an orderly Universe.
So who are you to go against the bidding of Nature?
Who are you to refuse man his share of the work?"
- Marcus Aurelius

Lack of Character

Possibly the best, and most accurate way of "defining" character is to point to something we're all pretty familiar with, what character is not.

"Diseases of the soul
are more dangerous and more numerous
than those of the body."
- Cicero

"Some people are so shallow and frivolous
that they are as far removed from having any real fault
as from having any solid virtues."
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Men, and bits of paper, blown about . . ."
- T. S. Eliot

". . . they lust for pleasures that pass away:
in truth they attain pleasures that pass away."
- The Bhagavad Gita

". . . man is compared to a house
in which there is a multitude of servants
but no master and no steward.
The servants have all forgotten their duties;
no one wants to do what he ought;
everyone tries to be master, if only for a moment . . ."
- G. I. Gurdjieff

"The fool doth think he is wise,
but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."
- William Shakespeare

"Strong men know not despair, Arjuna,
for this wins neither heaven nor earth.
Fall not into degrading weakness,
for this becomes not a man who is a man."
- The Bhagavad Gita

"It is with narrow-souled people
as with narrow-necked bottles:
the less they have in them,
the more noise they make in pouring it out."
- Alexander Pope

"Everyone thinks of changing the world,
but no one thinks of changing himself."
- Leo Tolstoy

"He is a man of brick. As if he was born as a baby
literally of clay and decades of exposure
have baked him to the color and hardness of brick."
- John Updike

"A man of great common sense and good taste,
- meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."
- George Bernard Shaw

"It is worse still to be ignorant
of your ignorance."
- St. Jerome

"The very strength of character which enables a person
to fight against falling in love
also makes that love violent and lasting.
Weak people who are constantly tossed about by passions
are hardly ever really possessed by them."
- Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

The Real Self and the False Self

We all know what we mean when we talk about a person being a "phony"; somebody who lies about themselves, masks their desires and intentions, conceals what they really think or do behind a "mask" they show the world; in short, a lack of what is called "integrity," or a sense of wholeness or completeness.

Even the word "personality" comes from the Latin "per sonare," meaning "to sound through," referring to the mask used by Greek actors. So if "personality" were really the same, then, as a "mask," then perhaps it's not too far a stretch to say that, to one degree or another, we're all phonies.

If this would be the case, then it seems the task we have before us is to do what we can to remove the mask, to show our true faces, to see what lies beneath who we think we are. In short, to set about the task of finding out who we really are, underneath. Because quite possibly, the world will do this to us, sooner or later, anyway.

"Men should be what they seem."
- William Shakespeare

"During peacetime,
a warlike man
sets upon himself."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The world breaks everyone
and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
But those that will not break it kills.
It kills the very good and the very gentle
and the very brave impartially.
If you are none of these you can be sure
that it will kill you too
but there will be no special hurry."
- Ernest Hemingway

"True, whoever looks into the mirror of the water
will see first of all his own face.
Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself.
The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it;
namely, the face we never show to the world
because we cover it with the persona,
the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask
and shows the true face."
- Carl G. Jung

"Ordinary life, social and business,
is largely a polite mask
which hides a seething mass of negative emotions."
- C. S. Nott

"The devil can cite Scripture
for his purpose."
- William Shakespeare

"I wish to preach,
not the doctrine of ignoble ease,
but the doctrine of the strenuous life."
- Theodore Roosevelt

"Hateful to me as the gates of Hades
is that man who hides one thing in his heart
and speaks another."
- Homer

"In Confession the sinner tells what he knows;
in analysis the neurotic has to tell more."
- Sigmund Freud

"Look at the net and its many contradictions.
You do and undo at every step.
You want peace, love, happiness
and work hard to create pain, hatred and war.
You want longevity and overeat, you want friendship and exploit.
See your net as made of such contradictions and remove them -
- your very seeing them will make them go."
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless,
and knowledge without integrity
is dangerous and dreadful."
- Samuel Johnson

"It is necessary to the happiness of man
that he be mentally faithful to himself.
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving,
it consists in professing to believe
what one does not believe."
- Thomas Paine

"Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality,
it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul."
- D. T. Suzuki

"This above all:
to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
- William Shakespeare

"Be so true to thyself,
as thou be not false to others."
- Francis Bacon

"All you want is to be happy.
All your desires, whatever they may be,
are of longing for happiness.
Basically, you wish yourself well.
. . . To imagine that some little thing - food, sex, power, fame -
will make you happy is to deceive oneself.
Only something as vast and deep as your real self
can make you truly and lastingly happy."
- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

"All visible object, man, are but as pasteboard masks . . .
strike, strike thought the mask!"
- Herman Melville

Some individuals speak about "practices" which enable one to "take off" the "masks"...

Poise: The Eye of the Hurricane

Rudyard Kipling, in the poem below, offers a type of non-guidance for navigating through the mazes and labyrinths of life: it is hard, perhaps impossible, to find any hard-and-fast rules which are completely true in any circumstances. Rather, the formula, or really, the "non-formula" he describes is more a state of watchful paradox, where one does not go, in a sense, too far right or too far left, and yet is not compromised. Character, then, is the ability to stay wakefully poised, in the middle of a chaos of opposites, in the tension in between.

"If"

- Rudyard Kipling

If you can hold your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting, too
If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies
Or being hated, don't give way to hating
And yet don't look too good or talk too wise
If you can dream, and not make dreams your master
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them, "Hold on!"
If you can talk with crowds, and keep your virtue
Or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you
If all men count with you, but none too much
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run
Your is the earth, and everything that's in it
And, which is more, you'll be a man, my son.

A similar point is made in Ecclesiastes:

"To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
a time to rend, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time of war, and a time of peace."
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

- and is further commented upon by Ken Wilber:

". . . the great liberation consists in
being freed of the pairs of opposites, freed of duality -
and finding instead the nondual One Taste that gives rise to both.
This is liberation because we cease
the impossible, painful dream
of spending our entire lives
trying to find an up without a down,
an inside without an outside,
a good without an evil,
a pleasure without its inevitable pain."
- Ken Wilber

- and F. Scott Fitzgerald:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence
is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind
at the same time,
and still retain the ability to function."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

- as well as Father William McNamara:

"When you live in tension,
that is the best possible atmosphere
for high creativity.
That's where the void is
and that's where God is:
in between.
We need a two-eyed view.
Otherwise there will be no charge, no electricity;
there will be no joy."
- Father William McNamara

Grace Under Pressure

Another aspect of understanding character that often seems to resurface is "strength of character," in the sense that Hemingway described "guts" as a certain quality of having "grace under pressure." In this sense, "character" is the poise that is forged and molded in the midst of the hassles, hardships, and pressures of the world.

The challenge, then, is to maintain that certain mysterious quality where one is able, somehow, to keep one's sanity, clarity, integrity, and presence, even in the midst of heated challenges, the art of being "in the world, but not of it," remembering oneself while enduring the tests and trials of life.

"The Right Stuff."
- Tom Wolfe

"Walk, don't wobble."
- Zen Saying

"It is by presence of mind
in untried emergencies
that the native mettle of a man
is tested."
- James Russell Lowell

"A talent is formed in stillness,
a character in the world's torrent."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"One often learns more from ten days of agony
than from ten years of contentment."
- Merle Shain

"Our life evokes our character."
- Joseph Campbell

"For the more you suffer the deeper grows your character,
and with the deepening of your character
you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.
All great artists, all great religious leaders,
and all great social reformers
have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely,
quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts.
Unless you eat your bread in sorrow, you cannot taste of real life.
Mencius is right when he says that
when Heaven wants to perfect a great man
it tries him in every possible way
until he comes out triumphantly from all his painful experience."
- D. T. Suzuki

"I will not steep my speech in lies;
the test of any man lies in action."
- Pindar

"From the world of the senses, Arjuna,
comes heat and comes cold, and pleasure and pain.
They come and they go: they are transient.
Arise above them, strong soul.
The man whom these cannot move,
whose soul is one, beyond pleasure and pain,
is worthy of life in Eternity."
- The Bhagavad Gita

"For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land,
so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti,
full of peace and joy,
but encompassed by all the horrors
of the half known life."
- Herman Melville

"To see a man fearless in danger,
Untainted by lust,
Happy in adversity,
Composed in turmoil,
And laughing at all those things
which are either coveted or reared by others -
All men must acknowledge,
that this can be nothing else
but a beam of divinity animating a human body."
- Seneca

"Show me a man who is hard-pressed, and happy,
In danger, and happy,
On his death-bed - and happy,
In exile - and happy,
In evil report - and happy."
- Epictetus

"Who unperturbed by changing conditions
sits apart and watches and says,
'the powers of nature go round',
and remains firm and shakes not;
Who dwells in his inner self,
and is the same in pleasure and pain;
to whom gold or stones or earth are one,
and what is pleasing or displeasing leave him in peace;
who is beyond both praise and blame,
and whose mind is steady and quiet;
Who is the same in honour or disgrace,
and has the same love for enemies or friends,
who surrenders all selfish undertakings
- this man has gone beyond all three."
- The Bhagavad Gita

"Whatever this is . . .
is obtained after a fierce battle fought
with the entire strength of your personality.
A contentment gleaned from idleness
or from a laissez-faire attitude of mind
is a thing most to be abhorred.
There is no Zen in this, but sloth and mere vegetation.
The battle must rage in its full vigor and masculinity.
Without it, whatever peace that obtains is a simulacrum,
and it has no deep foundation;
the first storm it may encounter will crush it to the ground."
- D. T. Suzuki

"If he should behold the glorious sight
of all the Buddhas coming to welcome him,
surrounded by every kind of gorgeous manifestation,
he would feel no desire to approach them.
If he should behold all sorts of horrific forms surrounding him,
he would experience no terror.
He would just be himself,
oblivious of conceptual thought and one with the Absolute.
He would have attained the state of unconditioned being.
This, then, is the fundamental principle."
- Huang Po

What's Actually Yours

We all know the story of Noah and the Ark: Noah began building a huge boat and kept working on it, even when everyone made fun of him for it. A great flood came, and everyone but Noah and those he brought aboard, drowned.

Perhaps the story is really a metaphor: You (and me) are "Noah" (or, at least, can be); the "ship" is your character; and the "flood" is death.

It seems that one of the more brutal aspects of life is the recognition that, literally, everything can be taken away from you. In the absolute worst-case scenario, someone could potentially take your house, your car, your job, your money, your clothes, your good looks, your family, your life . . .

So, if that's the case, one way that "character" is often defined is that it is the one thing that nothing, and no one, no matter what happens, can take from you.

"I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world
still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment,
in the contemplation of his beloved.
In a position of utter desolation,
when man cannot express himself in positive action,
when his only achievement may consist in
enduring his sufferings in the right way -
- an honorable way - in such a position man can,
through loving contemplation
of the image he carries of his beloved,
achieve fulfillment."
- Viktor Frankl

"In a man's life,
his time is but a moment, his being a mere flux,
his senses a dim glimpse, his body food for the worms,
and his soul a restless eddy . . .
the things of the body pass like a flowing stream;
life is a brief sojourn;
and one's mark in this world
is soon forgotten."
- Marcus Aurelius

". . . time is no healer . . . "
- T. S. Eliot

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favor to men of skill;
but time and chance happeneth to them all."
- Ecclesiastes

Inner Freedom and Inner Slavery

Everyone want freedom, and everyone want to live in a free country, a free land, a free life. And by many standards, we have achieved, politically, an admirable degree of freedom.

But what about slavery, that is inside?

"Man is born free,
but everywhere is in chains."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau

"In what manner are men free who,
in some way, to some extent, are enslaved
by sex, society, ambition, swelling desires,
possessions, neighbours, associates, and family?"
- Paul Brunton

"Fundamentally, therefore, any man can,
even under such circumstances,
decide what shall become of him - mentally and spiritually.
He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp. . .
It is this spiritual freedom - which cannot be taken away -
that makes life meaningful and purposeful."
- Viktor Frankl

"Does a man own a house,
or does a house own a man?"
- Richard Rose

"No, when the fight begins with himself,
A man's worth something."
- Robert Browning

"The human condition is so wretched
that while bending his every action to pander to his passions
man never ceases groaning against their tyranny.
He can neither accept their violence
nor the violence he must do himself in order to shake off their yoke.
Not only the passions but also their antidotes fill him with disgust,
and he cannot be reconciled either
to the discomfort of his disease
or to the trouble of a cure."
- La Rochefoucauld

"Give me a man
That is not passion's slave,
and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay,
in my heart of heart,
As I do thee."
- William Shakespeare

"That man, I think,
has had a liberal education who has been so trained in his youth
that his body is the ready servant of his will,
and does with ease and pleasure all the work that,
as a mechanism, it is capable of;
whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine,
with all its parts of equal strength,
and in smooth working order;
ready, like a steam engine,
to be turned to any kind of work,
and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind;
whose mind is stored with a knowledge of
the great and fundamental truths of Nature
and of the laws of her operations;
one who, no stunted ascetic,
is full of life and fire,
but knows passions are trained to come to heel
by a vigorous will,
the servant of a tender conscience;
who has learned to love all beauty,
whether of Nature or of art,
to hate all vileness,
and to respect others as himself."
- Thomas Henry Huxley

"Arete": Excellence of Character

Everyone wants to become the kind of person they, and certain others, respect. A quality of "excellence" applies to everything from a golf game, to speaking ability, to parenting, beauty, talent, hard work, and so on, to almost any area of life. Yet, there is also the quality known as "Arete" referring to an excellence that precedes and underlies all other manifestations of excellence . . . excellence of character.

"Anyone can become angry---
that is easy.
But to be angry with the right person,
to the right degree,
at the right time,
for the right purpose,
and in the right way---
this is not easy."
- Aristotle

". . . the strength of a spirit should be measured
according to how much of the "truth" one could still barely endure
- or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it
to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Anger is a weed;
hate is the tree."
- Saint Augustine

"Most people die
with their music still inside them."
- Unknown

"'We live in a dark age,' I said.
'An age where men say one thing and mean another.
A time of dwarfs afraid of life.
The days are gone when mighty Pindar
sang his radiant blossoms of song.
When the noble passions of men set ablaze cities
and the heroic deeds of men rang like thunder
to every corner of the earth.'"
- Harry Mark Petrakis

"This is the mark of a perfect character
- to pass through each day as though it were the last,
without agitation, without torpor, and without pretense."
- Marcus Aurelius

"Only those with real strength of character
can have real gentleness;
those who look gentle are usually merely weak,
and weakness easily goes sour."
- La Rochefoucauld

"A real free will
would not be the merely random upsurges
of an irresponsible irrational being.
It must be developed out of self-mastery."
- Paul Brunton

"I'm not fearing any man."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Withdraw into yourself and look.
And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet,
act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful:
he cuts away here, he smoothes there,
he makes this line lighter, this other purer,
until a lovely face has grown upon his work.
So do you also:
cut away all that is excessive,
straighten all that is crooked,
bring light to all that is overcast,
labour to make all one glow of beauty
and never cease chiselling your statue,
until there shall shine out on you
from it the godlike splendour of virtue,
until you shall see the perfect goodness
surely established in the stainless shrine."
- Plotinus

Self-Reliance

Character is one of those fundamental things in life, like eating, drinking, breathing . . . that no one can do for you.

"Whoso would be a man
must be a nonconformist."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"He is the strongest man in the world
that stands alone."
- Henrik Ibsen

"Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters
when God has brewed them into a gale!
Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall!"
- Herman Melville

"One must shed the bad taste
of wanting to agree with many."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Education is an admirable thing,
but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing worth knowing can be taught."
- Oscar Wilde

"There also seems a parallel
between the role of the Socratic dialectic
in the education of the intellect
and the role of free-association
in the psychoanalytic education of the emotions.
Both are developed from the observation
that virtue cannot be taught,
i.e., the truth cannot simply be stated by the teacher
and learned by rote by the pupil
because the results of learning cannot be separated
from the process of inquiry
which each individual must live through
for himself at first-hand."
- W. H. Auden

"In the last analysis
each man stands alone."
- Leo Buscaglia

Priorities

The foundation of character is a clear sense of priorities, based on rock-solid principles - a clear knowing of what is important and not important, what is worth doing and what is not, what is worth worrying about and what is not, what the "Big Picture" of matters is, so we can spend the limited amount of time and energy we have in life, on things that really matter.

"Why, what is pomp, rule, reign, but earth and dust?
And, live we how we can, yet die we must."
- William Shakespeare

"Men flourish
only for a moment."
- Homer

"Everything is only for a day,
both that which remembers
and that which is remembered."
- Marcus Aurelius

". . . For I go around
and do nothing but persuade you,
both younger and older,
not to care for bodies and money before,
nor as vehemently as,
how your soul will be the best possible."
- Socrates

"What is impermanent
is not worth striving for."
- Ramana Maharshi

"There is no more fatal blunderer
than he who consumes the greater part of his life
getting his living."
- Henry David Thoreau

"What does it profit a man
if he should gain the world
and lose his soul?"
- Jesus of Nazareth

". . . and he that is today a king
tomorrow shall die."
- Ecclesiastes

"Little things
affect little minds."
- Benjamin Disraeli

"A generation of men is like a generation of leaves:
the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground,
while others the burgeoning wood brings forth -
and the season of spring comes on.
So of men on generation springs forth and another ceases."
- Homer

"The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death."
- William Shakespeare

". . . and I have seen
the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker . . ."
- T. S. Eliot

"The soul is subject to health and disease,
just as is the body.
The health and disease of both . . .
undoubtedly depend upon beliefs and customs,
which are peculiar to mankind."
- Maimonides

. . . so then, what can we do about it?

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