We want others to see in us qualities we do not believe we possess.
From The Care of the Self, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
A man stood at the mirror in the window of the hardware store on Pine for a long while this morning, straightening a collar that was already straight. He did it four times. I used to think vanity was a man admiring himself; I was wrong about that for years, since what I watched was closer to rehearsal, a man checking whether the part would hold up under light. We want others to see in us qualities we do not believe we possess, and the collar was the argument he was making. Switch says I preen before I fly down to anybody new, and I told him that was feathers, which is different, and then sat with it a while longer than I wanted to.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- By the time most of us begin to know ourselves, there seems too much to know.
- Others don’t get to define you unless you let them.
- It's hard to win a tug-of-war with yourself.
- If people knew how to be truly selfish, we would live in a more generous world.
- If you fall in love with yourself, you can't leave when it all goes bad.
- A humble person has less to worry about because he has less to live up to.