As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoiled by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.

Such I was, from eight to eight-and-twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I owe you! You taught me a lesson hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.

- Pride & Prejudice

“To this point, I cringe when I think back to how complacent I became on the career front when I was with Leo. My love for photography never waned completely, but I certainly loved it with far less urgency—just as everything in my life became secondary to our relationship. Leo was all I could think about, all I wanted to do. He filled me up so completely that I simply had no energy left to take photos. No time or motivation to even contemplate the next rung on my career ladder. I remember riding the bus to the photo lab every day, well after I had learned everything I could possibly learn from Quynh, and saying things to myself like, “I don’t need to look for another job. Money isn’t important to me. I’m happy with a simple life.”

- Love The One You’re With

"Passion is passion. It’s the excitement between the tedious spaces, and it doesn’t matter where it’s directed… It can be coins or sports or politics or horses or music or faith… the saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all."
— Dear John (via ifihadwings) (via pineappleupsidedown)
"To Lincoln, self-improvement meant a combination of hard work and a single-minded unwavering pursuit of knowledge."
— Abraham Lincoln: Self-Made Man
The fact that her immediate anxieties were relieved did not blind her to a possibility of their recurrence; it merely gave her enough buoyancy to rise once more above her doubts and feel a renewed faith in her beauty, her power, and her general fitness to attract a brilliant destiny. It could not be that one conscious of such aptitutdes of mastery and enjoyment was doomed to a perpetuity of failure; and her mistakes looked easily reparable in the light of her restored self-confidence.

- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Oh, to possess Lily Bart’s unflinching confidence! Although the “pride comes before a fall” idiom seems like it is likely to be realized in the coming pages. I’m not ready to finish this book; Edith Wharton’s words are so perfectly crafted.

Success=Republic of the spirit

“Ah, but I don’t suppose that: haven’t I told you that your genius lies in converting impulses into intentions?”

“My genius?” she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. “Is there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven’t succeeded.”

Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her. “Success—what is success? I shall be interested to have your definition.”

“Success?” She hesitated. “Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It’s a relative quality, after all. Isn’t that your idea of it?”

“My idea of it? God forbid!” He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. “My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.”

“Freedom? Freedom from worries?”

“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”

- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

"Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement."
— Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
If you spend your life trying to be good at everything, you will never be great at anything. While our society encourages us to be well-rounded, this approach inadvertently breeds mediocrity. Perhaps the greatest misconception of all is that of the well-rounded leader.

- Strengths Based Leadership

"Had I but died an hour before this chance/I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant,/there’s nothing serious in mortality:/all is but toys."
— Macbeth

From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry
“The stars are beautiful, because of a flower that cannot be seen.”

I replied, “Yes, that is so.” And, without saying anything more, I looked across the ridges of sand that were stretched out before us in the moonlight.

“The desert is beautiful,” the little prince added.

And that was true. I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams…

“What makes the desert beautiful,” said the little prince, “is that somewhere it hides a well…”

I was astonished by a sudden understanding of that mysterious radiation of the sands. When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and legend told us that a treasure was buried there. To be sure, no one had ever known how to find it; perhaps no one had ever even looked for it. But it cast an enchantment over that house. My home was hiding a secret in the depths of its heart…

“Yes,” I said to the little prince. “The house, the stars, the desert; what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible!”

“I am glad,” he said, “that you agree with my fox.”

~ Chapter XXIV

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Themed by: Hunson