COMPLACENCY

Related States & Conditions | Syntonic | Dystonic

By God, don't linger
in any spiritual benefit you have gained,
but yearn for more – like one suffering from illness
whose thirst for water is never quenched.
This Divine Court is the Plane of the Infinite.
Leave the seat of honor behind;
let the Way be your seat of honor.
Rumi
1207-1273, Afghani-Turkish Sufi Mystic, Poet
Mathnawi III, 1960-61, The Pocket Rumi Reader , Kabir Helminski, ed., 2001

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
Thomas Huxley
1825-1895, English Biologist
Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley

Sad will be the day for any man when he becomes contented with the thoughts he is thinking and the deeds he is doing – where there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do.
Phillips Brooks
1835-1893, American Episcopal Cleric

Those who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance. How pretty their dreams must have been! … Only through the unattainable does man achieve a hope worth living and dying for – and so attain himself .
Eugene Oneill
1888-1953, American Dramatist, 1936 Nobel Laureate

We accept what we are used to and never think about it.
Lin Yutang
1895-1976, Chinese Writer, Dramatist, Translator
The Pleasures of a Noncomformist

Philosophers are intellectual troublemakers. They are reluctant to take things at their face value. They set out to disturb complacency. Ignorance is not altogether bliss, and in the field of learning, as in politics, it is only because some people are prepared to make trouble that anything of importance ever gets done.
A. J. Ayer
1910-1989, English Philosopher
in The Guardian , 1963

There is plenty of room at the top, but not enough to sit down.
Fred Shero
1925-, Canadian/American Ice Hockey Coach

Complacency in the presence of miracles is like opening the door to your own tomb.
Rod Steiger
1925-, American Actor
in Esquire , 1969

People who are resting on their laurels are wearing them on the wrong end.
Malcolm Kushner
1952-, American Writer

If you think you're tops, you won't do much climbing.
Arnold H. Glasgow

The quickest and shortest way to crush whatever laurels you have won is for you to rest on them.
- Donald P. Jones

Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage.
- Naomi Littlebear
Native American Writer
The Dark of the Moon

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Wisdom for The Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing, © 2004