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Q: Is it true that we can use all uncomfortable conditions for gaining more valuable self-insight? If so, will you please show us how?
 Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so. 
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-- Schopenhauer
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A: Your friends will tell you that they are sincere; your enemies are really so. Let your enemies' criticism be like a bitter medicine, to be used as a means of self-knowledge. Q: What if a person commits a wrong, but says he is sorry about it afterwards. Should we not accept his remorse as fully genuine? A: He will inevitably repeat the offence, or do something similar to it, should the occasion return, even though for the moment he is deep and sincere in his assurances of the contrary. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget, except himself, his own character. For character is incorrigible, because all a man's actions arise from an inward principle; he must always do the same thing under like circumstances, and he cannot do otherwise.
Q: I am very pleased at how my new insight into human nature has swept away many harmful beliefs. A: It is very necessary that a man should be appraised early in life that it is a masquerade in which he finds himself, for otherwise, there are many things which he will fail to understand.
Q: Real teachers think from a higher level? A: Great minds are like eagles, and build their nest in some lofty solitude.
Q: I accept the existence of this new way of thinking towards life, and I believe that certain men, like Christ and Buddha, found it. However, it is only a vague concept in my mind. Can you explain my difficulty to me? A: No man can see over his own height. Let me explain what I mean. You cannot see in another man any more than you have in yourself. Your own level strictly determines the extent to which he comes within your understanding. If your intelligence is unawakened, mental qualities in another, even though they be of the highest kind, will have no effect on you at all . . . his higher mental faculties will no more exist for you than colors exist for those who cannot see.
Q: It is now clear to me that I have been living mostly from borrowed ideas, so I wish to start all over again and think for myself. This is possible, isn't it? Schopenhauer's Answer: A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument -- perhaps a piano, which is a small orchestra in itself. Such a man is a small world in himself, and the effects produced by various instruments together, he produces all by himself, in the unity of his own consciousness.
Q: What benefit comes to us as we carry these principles into our daily life in business and at home? A: The chief result gained by experience is clearness of view. This is what distinguishes the man of mature age . . . it is only then that he sees things plainly, and takes them for what they really are, while in earlier years he saw a phantom-world, put together with the whims of imaginations of his own mind . . the real world was hidden from him, or the vision of it distorted. The first thing that experience does is to free us from the phantoms of the mind.
Q: What mental technique might we put into operation for abolishing unhappiness? A: It is most important for anyone who is capable of higher and nobler thoughts to keep his mind from being so completely engrossed with private affairs and ungracious troubles as to let them take up all his attention and crowd out worthier matters, for that is, in a very real sense, to lose sight of the true end of life.
Q: If we could only find a way to make this fact a guiding light in everything that happens to us. A: Courage comes next to prudence as a quality of mind very essential to happiness . . . Our motto should be 'No Surrender', and far from yielding to the ills of life, let us take fresh courage from misfortune . . . Let our attitude be such that we would not quake even if the world fell in ruins around us.
Q: My imagination is constantly running off unhappy scenes from my past. I don't like the strange hold these scenes have on me. A: This pulling out of the imagination which I am recommending, will also forbid us to summon up the memory of past misfortune, to paint a dark picture of the injustice or harm that has been done us, the losses we have sustained, the insults, slights and annoyances to which we have been exposed, for to do that is to arouse fresh life into all those hateful passions long laid asleep -- the anger and resentment which disturb and pollute our nature.
Q: What might we see in ourselves which would finally prove to be valuable self-knowledge? A: To affect a quality, and to plume yourself upon it, is just to confess that you do not have it. Whether it is courage, or learning, or intellect, or wit, or success with women, or riches, or social position, or whatever else it may be that a man boasts of, you may conclude by his boasting about it that this is precisely the direction in which he is rather weak, for if a man really possesses any faculty to the full, it will not occur to him to make a great show of affecting it; he is quite content to know that he has it. (There's More! Click "next" below)
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