“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie, comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Hmmm.
A similar one I heard it, as referenced and recited by Earl Nightengale,
from his audio series “Lead the Field” (highly recommended), and likewise, “The Strangest Secret”
{Nightengale-Conant personal development and motivational audio products}
from Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78–82
Polonius:
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!”
Laertes:
“Most humbly do I take my leave, my lord.”
further…from scene 3, 75–77
Polonius:
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.”
Old Polonius counsels his hotheaded son Laertes, who is about to embark for Paris for his gentleman’s education [see THE PRIMROSE PATH]. While he still has the chance, Polonius wholesales a stockroom of aphorisms, the most famous of which is “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
On Polonius’s terms, there is little to argue with in his perhaps ungenerous advice. His logic is thus: lending money to friends is risky, because hitching debt onto personal relationships can cause resentment and, in the case of default, loses the lender both his money and his friend. Borrowing invites more private dangers: it supplants domestic thrift (“husbandry”)—in Polonius’s eyes, an important gentlemanly value.
Incidentally, in the days when Hamlet was first staged, borrowing was epidemic among the gentry, who sometimes neglected husbandry to the point where they were selling off their estates piece by piece to maintain an ostentatious lifestyle in London.
source: http://www.enotes.com
“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot