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One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. They will gravitate as automatically as the needle to the north.
when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.
Often people have asked me, “How do you recover from disaster?” I don’t know any answer except the obvious one: You do it by meeting it and going on. From each you learn something, from each you acquire additional strength and confidence in yourself to meet the next one when it comes.
When things that happen to you are inevitable there is a kind of courage that comes from sheer desperation. If it is inevitable and has to be met, you can meet it.
Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
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.
To be mature you have to realize what you value most.
Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.
nothing ever happens to us except what happens in our minds. Unhappiness is an inward, not an outward, thing. It is as independent of circumstances as is happiness. Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.
“A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.”
the feeling that you are, in some way, useful. Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.
One day I said firmly, “Nobody likes people who cry. If you are happy everyone will want to be with you. If you are sad and cry, nobody will want to be with you. If you must cry, go into the bathroom and cry alone into the bathtub.”
For each of us our load of trouble is our personal burden to carry, not something to be sloughed off on someone else. Also, and it’s a curious thing, if you don’t make a parade of your unhappiness to someone else, you’ll find it is a lot easier to get over it.
Love can often be misguided and do as much
harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.
It’s your life—but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what
is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.
Why do I have to be different? That is a question which has been effectively stilled in Russia, where one of the major objectives is to make sure that no one is different. There the research done by Pavlov in conditioning reflexes in dogs and other animals is, it seems to me, now used on men, wiping out their differences, “correcting” their individuality, which has no place in a Communist world; which is, indeed, inimical to it.
Your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called “a success.”
This is your life, not someone else’s. It is your own feeling of what is important, not what people will say. Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. Some of them will attribute to you motives you never dreamed of. Some of them will misinterpret your words and actions,
“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.”
respect for others, which should be instilled in every child, one should form the habit of really seeing the people one meets, paying attention to them so that one will be able to recognize them the next time and give them a sense of individuality.
If you approach each new person you meet in a spirit of adventure you will find that you become increasingly interested in them and endlessly fascinated by the new channels of thought and experience and personality that you encounter.
Yet it must be obvious that one of the most effective techniques in dealing with people is to appeal to them for their help. If they think you are in need of their assistance and that you will appreciate it, they are apt to do their best to help fill your need.
In group work, it is certainly the better part of wisdom to take the result and let the credit go.
Curiously enough, it is often the people who refuse to assume any responsibility who are apt to be the sharpest critics of those who do.
