Let us recall that at the start we distinguished the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter the one who makes no demands on himself, but contents himself with what he is, and is delighted with himself. Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man, who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline – the noble life.
Jose Ortega y Gassett
As one advances in life, one realizes more and more that the majority of men – and of women – are incapable of any other effort than that strictly imposed on them as a reaction to an external compulsion. And for that reason, the few individuals we have come across who are capable of a spontaneous and joyous effort stand out, isolated, monumentalised, so to speak, in our experience. These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.
Jose Ortega y Gassett
The fact that you believe implicitly that you can do what may seem impossible or very difficult to others, shows that there is something within you that has gotten a glimpse of power sufficient to do the thing. Many men who have achieved great things cannot account for their faith. They cannot tell why they had the implicit confidence that they could do what they undertook, but the result was evidence that something within them had gotten a glimpse of latent resourcefulness, reserve power, and possibilities which would warrant that faith; and they have gone ahead – often when they could not see a ray of light – with implicit confidence that they would come out all right, because this faith told them so. It told them so because it had been in communication with something within them that was divine, that which had passed the bounds of the limited and had entered the domain of the limitless.
Orison Swett Marden (loves his long sentences
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