It has never seemed to me that people who look noble and feel noble when they are doing right, can ever really do it. I am not putting forward in the present tragic crisis of my nation, the idea of self-criticism, of self-confession, and of self-discipline, with any weak little wistful idea that beautiful and noble people will blossom up in business all over the country and practice them. I am offering self-discipline as a substitute for disciplining other people in business, as a source of originality, power and ideas, and as a means of getting and deserving to get everything one wants. I am offering self-discipline because it works. People who get so low in their minds and who so little see how self-discipline works that they actually have the face to feel noble and beautiful about it when they are having some, cannot make it work. They must be leaving most of theirs out....
The psychology of self-discipline is the psychology of the inventor.
The inventor is the man who lives in the daily habit of criticising his own mind, and disciplining himself. The source of his creative and original power is that more than other men he keeps facing necessities in himself, keeps casting off old selves, old preconceptions and breaking through to new ones.
The spiritual and intellectual source of the grip of the inventor upon modern life, is that he is a scientist in managing his own human nature and his own mind, that he had a relentless rejoicing habit of disciplining himself.
In every renaissance, revival or self-renewal the world has had, people have had the time of their lives. The great days of history have been the eras of great candid truth-facing, self-discipline. Self-discipline and self-discovery go together.
There is a greater return on the investment in being born again, in getting what one wants, than in anything else in the world.
If one sees through himself, he can see through anybody. It explains and clears up one's enemies and clears one's own life for action.
§ 5. To-morrow.
I am not writing a beautiful wistful work on how I wish human nature would work or hope it is going to work, in America.