Perhaps the most common element in frustrated biographies of talented men is the inability to stop an undesirable course of events, the inability to go against what is convenient for the sake of one’s own affirmation. In this, they end up wasting themselves. Talent is not accompanied by responsibility for it, and this, if not developed and cultivated, will cause the great possibilities to be dispersed in a great lament.
Category: Notes
There Are Authors With Truly Impressive…
There are authors with truly impressive powers of assimilation, and we realize that they often cannot define whether the ideas they express are their own or come from the references they reveal. Of course, there is some foundation for true learning. In order for an idea to be grasped, it has to be felt as one’s own, even if it is later abandoned. Ideally, however, the greatest intellectual will be the one who encompasses everything and absorbs everything; thus, since nothing is foreign to him, he is able to express everything as his own.
If It Were Possible to Realize…
If it were possible to realize, whenever something is lost, what is necessarily gained by losing it, life would be viewed very differently. Firstly, because possessions weigh down, consume and bind: the sadness of losing them would be compensated by the awareness of liberation. But, above all, because to understand this ambiguity, sometimes veiled but omnipresent, is to situate oneself much better in a reality that simultaneously deprives and enables, while always leaving room for strengthening and affirmation.
Fear Is Often Humiliating, Because Once…
Fear is often humiliating, because once it is recognized as unfounded, one has to admit to wasting opportunities that will never come again. Then one thinks about how much one does not do because of this feeling which, if it is not cowardice, has an undesirable restrictive effect. No one feels at ease when faced with the image of a worse future; however, the means of glimpsing it are so precarious that it is almost always best not to worry.