Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.
How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.
It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
We can be civil to each other, and we can try to express ourselves acknowledging that we're all patriots, we're all Americans, and not assume the absolute worst in people's motives.
Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.