Your body must become familiar with its death - in all its possible forms and degrees - as a self-evident, imminent, and emotionally neutral step on the way towards the goal you have found worthy of your life. ↗
But I think you have to - whatever the environment looks like, it does enter into people's art work one way or another; it's very remote or it isn't. It's remote in my work but it has to have a certain degree of ordinariness. ↗
It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy. ↗
Leadership consists not in degrees of technique but in traits of character; it requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort, and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint. ↗
Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness. ↗