You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life
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education. Nobody can learn all he needs to know. Education provides the necessary tools, equipment by which we learn how to learn. The object of all our education and
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back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can grow only as long as we are interested.
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What is essential is to train the mind so that it is capable of finding facts as it needs them, train it to learn how to learn.
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You must be interested in anything that comes your way.
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so easily have shut her off from life. And yet life came to her, sought her out. Best of all, it needed her.
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We cannot shut the windows and pull down the shades; we cannot say, “I have learned all I need to know; my opinions are fixed on everything. I refuse to change or to consider these new things.” Not today. Not any more.
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This power of imagination is a kind of defense in childhood. You get away from the realities. It makes you important to yourself. If used correctly, it makes it more possible for you later on to imagine what other people are like and what they think and feel. It helps to keep you curious, anxious to understand what is going on around you. Of course, unless it is checked, imagination can remain only a means of escape; but if it is nourished and directed, it can become a flame that lights the way to new things, new ideas, new experience.
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I do know that the discipline one imposes on oneself is the only sure bulwark one has against fear.
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But the withholding of information from a child either frustrates him or makes him seek it for himself. And the trouble with the latter method is that it is apt to make the child feel both guilty and dishonest.
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You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
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If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy.
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When things that happen to you are inevitable there is a kind of courage that comes from sheer desperation.
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either I must learn how to deal with situations or I must go down in defeat,
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I forgot to be afraid myself in my thankfulness
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Well, what security did our first settlers have when they embarked on the Mayflower? Only what they could create for themselves with their own courage, their own activities, their own trust in themselves to be able to meet any situations—all unknown, all threatening—that they might encounter. It is the only way anyone can plan his life.
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Age needs the company of youth, I think, and it always does me good.
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Since everybody is an individual, nobody can be you. You are unique. No one can tell you how to use your time. It is yours. Your life is your own. You mold it. You make it. All anyone can do is to point out ways and means which have been helpful to others. Perhaps they will serve as suggestions to stimulate your own thinking until you know what it is that will fulfill you, will help you to find out what you want to do with your life. Each of us has, as my husband’s rather grim-faced ancestress pointed out, all the time there is. Those years, weeks, hours, are the sands in the glass running ...more
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mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world all of us need both love and charity.”
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You have to be honest with yourself.
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Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people.
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If you refuse to accept the limitation in yourself, you will be unable to grow beyond this point.
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You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.
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So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.
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From the time they are little girls women are expected to adapt themselves. They do this first in learning how to manage their father; then it is only a step to knowing how to manage their young men, and finally their husbands.
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But I am inclined to believe that for men the aging process is more painful than for women, who learned so young to adjust. For a man who has been accustomed to have people dependent on him, the decline of the period of dominance, the approach of the period of dependence, is a hard situation to face.
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One reason for this ability to cope with disaster is that nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds.
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Death is unnatural when it comes to the young, but with age it is normal and inevitable and, like everything else that has been inevitable in life, becomes easier to accept. Some people have certain religious beliefs which they find help them to meet death with greater equanimity. I happen to think that a belief in God is really all that is necessary for the acceptance of death, since you know that death, like life, is part of God’s pattern. Nature makes it easier if you are old, and if you have matured in a way to accept life and death as part of God’s pattern, as you accept the changing ...more
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She might have developed talents of many kinds. But what she wanted most was the power to make others answer her wishes. When she found that it was hard work to obtain the power by doing something that required real effort and development on her part, she accepted the easier way of gaining power through being an invalid. She made use of the terrible strength which is weakness. She wanted happiness, but her method of seeking it defeated her.
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For each of us our load of trouble is our personal burden to carry, not something to be sloughed off on someone else.
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But most women, I think, though they may complain a little about this, would agree that meeting the needs of others is not a real burden; it is what makes life worth living. It is probably the deepest satisfaction a woman has.
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and I learned again the lesson that you fear in apprehension far more than you actually suffer in reality.
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“Get ahead of whom? There is no one I want to shove past. I just want to get ahead of myself, make myself as big as I can, but not measure myself by someone else.”
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Spinoza once made a profound comment: “Men believe a thing when they behave as though it were true.”
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Intellectually, one may have known for years that certain needs exist, but until one sees with one’s own eyes and comes to feel with one’s own heart, one will never understand other people.
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I have never known anyone to succeed over a period of time in dealing with people, particularly in committee work, if he assumed an air of complete self-sufficiency and behaved as though he had no need for the support or assistance of his colleagues.
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As a people, I am afraid, we tend too often to brush aside with impatience, sometimes with discourtesy, customs and points of view which are alien to us. If the way is not our way it is wrong!
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we are the sum total of the choices we have made.
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I believe most firmly that in the long run every single one of us must be responsible for himself and for his actions.
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It is not necessary for you to run for office. It is necessary to know how to work through the men who represent you.
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Politicians are neither all bad nor all good. They vary like all human beings.
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Unless indoctrinated, a child is too logical to understand discrimination.
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from all
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No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within.
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If the public itself condones or fosters corruption there is not a great deal that can be done about it higher up.