A Man in Full

by Tom Wolfe

man in full.

left him with a banged-up right knee, that had turned arthritic about three years ago. He didn’t associate that with age, however. It was an honorable wound of war.

Clusterfucking was a term Durwood had picked up in Vietnam, where soldiers in the field weren’t supposed to gather in clusters, lest all be wiped out by a single strike.

That is what I mean about keeping your character: such is its power with those who have acquired the habit of carrying it into every question that arises. You can be the ordinary thread in the tunic, or you can be the purple, that touch of brilliance that gives distinction to the rest.”

Like the bull, the man of noble nature does not become noble all of a sudden; he must train through the winter and make ready, and not lightly leap to meet things that concern him not.”

What little bit Conrad had learned about philosophy at Mount Diablo had seemed to concern people who were free and whose main problem was to choose from among life’s infinite possibilities.

Only Epictetus began with the assumption that life is hard, brutal, punishing, narrow, and confining, a deadly business, and that fairness and unfairness are beside the point.

There is no use spending your life agonizing over the things that are not dependent upon your will, such as money, possessions, fame, and political power. Likewise, there is no use spending your life trying to avoid the things that are not dependent upon your will, such as the tyranny of a Nero, imprisonment, and physical danger.

Book III of Epictetus … Will you realize once and for all that it is not death that is the source of a mean and cowardly spirit but rather the fear of death? Against this fear then I would have you discipline yourself—

The depressed man realizes that all daily routines imply a belief in Tomorrow and are cruel jokes since of course tomorrow no longer exists.

Because the source of his strength had always been his money, his reputation, his success in worldly affairs. But the one true source of strength was his own might, his own will, to get or to avoid, his own divine spark of reason, which enabled him to judge which things were in his power and which were beyond it.

“Just as every skill is strengthened by practice, so is every bad habit made worse by repetition.

One of the few freedoms that we have as human beings that cannot be taken away from us is the freedom to assent to what is true and to deny what is false.