"But duty strikes me as doing something. If you are too afraid it may be the wrong thing, you may let everything go."
"Being is doing, and if doing is duty, being is duty. Do you follow?"
"At great distance."
"To be what one may be, really and effcaciously, to feel it and understand it, to accept it, adopt it, embrace it--that's conduct, that's life."
"And suppose one's a brute or an ass, where's the efficacy?"
"In one's very want of intelligence. In such cases one is out of it-the question doesn't exist; one simply becomes a part of the duty of others. The brute, the ass neither feels, nor understands, nor accepts, nor adopts. Those fine processes in themselves classify us. They educate, they exalt, they preserve; so that, to profit by them, we must be as perceptive as we can. We must recognize our particular form, the instrument that each of us-each of us who carries anything-carries in his being. Mastering this instrument, learning to play it in perfection-that's what I call duty, what I call conduct, what I call success."
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I love language.
books
