We are about to give you a great bargain. You could buy a hundred self-help books on how to create personal peace that wouldn’t work as well as J. Robert Oppenheimer’s method, which lays it out in 176 words:
I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity. . . . I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire. . . . But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.
(Quoted from page 243 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
For a brief biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here. For images of and related to J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here.
I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity. . . . I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable; that we come a little to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire. . . . But because I believe that the reward of discipline is greater than its immediate objective, I would not have you think that discipline without objective is possible: in its nature discipline involves the subjection of the soul to some perhaps minor end; and that end must be real, if the discipline is not to be factitious. Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.
(Quoted from page 243 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg.)
For a brief biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here. For images of and related to J. Robert Oppenheimer, click here.
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