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“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
Retaliation is rejected when it would reproduce the very behavior one condemns.
Source note: Meditations 6.6; wording varies by translation.
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“Patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude,—and the rarest, too.”
Ruskin separates patience from mere persistence: fortitude is not only continuing to act, but also bearing delay, frustration and incomplete results without losing steadiness.
Source note: The Ethics of the Dust, Lecture IV, Project Gutenberg #4701. Ruskin immediately contrasts many persevering people with the rarer patient person and later insists that genuine patience is not necessarily passive or idle.
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“The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.”
The contrast treats composure as a feature of cultivated character rather than as freedom from all difficulty: the “superior man” is represented as settled enough not to live in continual inward distress.
Source note: The Analects of Confucius, Book VII, Chapter XXXVI, James Legge translation, Project Gutenberg #3330.
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“The greatest remedy for anger is delay.”
Delay interrupts the first impulse of anger and gives judgment time to test whether the perceived offence deserves the reaction it initially provoked.
Source note: On Anger, Book II, section 29.
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“Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”
Voice: Fictional character · Friar Laurence
Speed without judgment can undermine the very goal a person is pursuing, so patience becomes part of effective action.
Source note: Act 2, Scene 3; Friar Laurence urges Romeo to move with greater care.
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“coolness and presence of mind under all circumstances”
Osler defines professional imperturbability as maintaining enough composure to perceive and act clearly when circumstances are difficult or urgent.
Source note: Aequanimitas, valedictory address delivered at the University of Pennsylvania on May 1, 1889; preserved in the public-domain Aequanimitas collections. The phrase concerns professional composure and is not a recommendation for emotional suppression.