
“Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”
Mephistopheles and the Student
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
Satire IV, line 52.
The Satires
Tecum habita: noris quam sit tibi curta supellex.
“Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.”
Mephistopheles and the Student
Faust, Part 1 (1808)
“Think highly of yourself, that's how you get to the top”
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Context: Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: "Don't relinquish power, don't give away your lands." But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: "Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself."
“Do not judge yourself, but live with someone who knows how to behave himself properly.”
Saying 73
Letter to his brother Jeff from Guadalcanal (28 January 1943); p. 27
To Reach Eternity (1989)
Context: In spite of all the training you get and precautions you take to keep yourself alive, it's largely a matter of luck that decided whether or not you get killed. It doesn't make any difference who you are, how tough you are, how nice a guy you might be, or how much you may know, if you happen to be at a certain spot at a certain time, you get it. I've seen guys out of one hole to a better one and get it the next minute, whereas if they'd stayed still they wouldn't have been touched. I've seen guys decide to stay in a hole instead of moving and get it. I've seen guys move and watch the hole they were in get blown up a minute later. And I've seen guys stay and watch the place to which they had intended to move get blown up. It's all luck.
“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.”
Source: After the Quake
“To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet