Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.

Somewhere deep down there's a decent man in me, he just can't be found.

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

Your best friend and worst enemy are both in this room right now. It's not your neighbor right or left - and it's not God or the devil - it's you.

One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.

Sometimes I wish I was less of a maniac; sometimes I wish I was more.

The greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego's destructive and negative emotions and thoughts... which prevent us from attaining perfection.

We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.

I can't think of a greater single vehicle to goodness and a better world than if everyone battled their own natures

God defend me from myself.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.

Most of us actually stifle enough good impulses during the course of a day to change the current of our lives.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself - the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.

Happiness is dependent on self-discipline. We are the biggest obstacles to our own happiness. It is much easier to do battle with society and with others than to fight our own nature.

Why cannot we correct the baneful passions, without weakening the good?

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyse before we can live happily in this world.

There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.

A man's conflicts represent what he 'really' is.