
“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”
Source: Sharp Objects
VII, 30
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII
Context: Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.
“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you're really doing it to them.”
Source: Sharp Objects
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth
“The Forever Trees”, p. 327 (quoting a Zen saying)
The Ivory and the Horn (1996)
Professor Van Helsing to Dr. Seward
Dracula (1897)
Context: You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera.
As quoted in The Forbes Book of Business Quotations (2007) edited by Ted Goodman, p. 175