Kindle Notes & Highlights
When we consider the character of any individual, we naturally view it under two different aspects; first, as it may affect his own happiness; and secondly, as it may affect that of other people.
When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.
The command of the former was, by the ancient moralists above alluded to, denominated fortitude, manhood, and strength of mind; that of the latter, temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation.
A fretful temper, which feels, with too much sensibility, every little cross accident, renders a man miserable in himself and offensive to other people.
The man who feels little for his own misfortunes must always feel less for those of other people, and be less disposed to relieve them. The man who has little resentment for the injuries which are done to himself, must always have less for those which are done to other people, and be less disposed either to protect or to avenge them.
We are charmed with the gaiety of youth, and even with the playfulness of childhood: but we soon grow weary of the flat and tasteless gravity which too frequently accompanies old age.
A young man who has no relish for the diversions and amusements that are natural and suitable to his age, who talks of nothing but his book or his business, is disliked as formal and pedantic; and we give him no credit for his abstinence even from improper indulgences, to which he seems to have so little inclination.
There exists in the mind of every man, an idea of this kind, gradually formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of himself and of other people. It is the slow, gradual, and progressive work of the great demigod within the breast, the great judge and arbiter of conduct.
Freud's super ego
that no great man was ever completely satisfied with his own works.
Alexander the Great appears, not only to have wished that other people should think him a God, but to have been at least very well disposed to fancy himself such.
It is otherwise with the man of excessive self-estimation. The wise men who see him the nearest, admire him the least.
He abandons his confidence to flatterers and traitors, who pretend to idolize his vanity and presumption;
Trump
The man whose anger is restrained by fear, does not always lay aside his anger, but only reserves its gratification for a more safe opportunity.
Nature, too, had taught us, that as the prosperity of two was preferable to that of one, that of many, or of all, must be infinitely more so.
"Jesus was right"
lingering tortures,
Iroquois
and amidst the insults and derision of all the spectators;
My mind is also taken to the viking(germanic?) Blood eagle
under the agonies of pain and even of torture, in sickness, in sorrow for the loss of children, for the death of friends and relations,
Job
