Be Close To and Learn From People of Virtue and Compassion
All are human, but their types differ. Most belong to the unrefined; the truly kind-hearted are rare. A truly kind-hearted person is feared by most people. He is not afraid of his words causing offense; his expression is not fawning. (See for the foregoing.) If I can be close to and learn from people of great virtue and compassion, I will benefit immensely. My virtues will grow daily and my wrongdoings will lessen day by day. (See for the following.) Not becoming close with the kind-hearted is infinitely harmful. Lowly people will enter, and everything will turn bad.
Read more about this topic: Ti Tzu Kui, Chapter 6
Famous quotes containing the words close, learn, people, virtue and/or compassion:
“I’ve come close to matching the feeling of that night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never got there.... I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it, though, trying to always feel it in and through the music I play every day.”
—Miles Davis (1926–1991)
“A child who fears excessive retaliation for even minor offenses will learn very early on that to lie is to protect himself.... If your child intuits that you will react very punitively to his wrongdoing, he may be tempted to lie and may become, as time goes on, a habitual liar.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“There are people who possess not so much genius as a certain talent for perceiving the desires of the century, or even of the decade, before it has done so itself.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“Power makes gods. Virtue makes martyrs.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man. But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us—through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (20th century)