Source identified
“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.
Source identified
“For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule.”
Retaliation tends to reproduce hostility, while refusing to answer hatred with hatred creates the possibility of ending the cycle rather than extending it.
Source note: Dhammapada, early verses in Max Müller’s translation; the passage contrasts retaliation with non-hatred.
Source identified
“I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
Washington frames refusal to hate as protection of his own moral agency: another person’s prejudice or wrongdoing should not be allowed to dictate the emotional character of his inner life.
Source note: Up from Slavery, Chapter XI, “Making Their Beds Before They Could Lie On Them,” Project Gutenberg #2376. Washington says he learned from General Armstrong to reject racial hatred and applies that lesson specifically to hostility and wrongs inflicted on Black Americans; the historical context remains explicit rather than becoming generic advice to ignore mistreatment.
Source identified
“Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. He who has given up both victory and defeat, he, the contented, is happy.”
The verse questions identity built around winning: contentment becomes more available when life is not constantly interpreted as a contest that somebody else must lose.
Source note: Dhammapada 201, Max Müller translation; the line appears in the chapter on happiness and contrasts competitive victory with contentment.
Source identified
“It is good to tame the mind, which is difficult to hold in and flighty, rushing wherever it listeth; a tamed mind brings happiness.”
The verse treats inward steadiness as trained rather than accidental: a mind that is repeatedly brought under wise direction becomes a source of greater stability and happiness.
Source note: Dhammapada 35, F. Max Müller translation; the wording belongs to the chapter on thought and is preserved as a translated canonical verse rather than attributed to a modern individual author.
Source identified
“There is no fire like passion; there is no losing throw like hatred; there is no pain like this body; there is no happiness higher than rest.”
Rest here means a deeper release from agitating passions and hatred, not merely physical inactivity; the verse places inward quiet above the disturbances it has just named.
Source note: Dhammapada 202 in Max Müller’s translation; “rest” belongs to the Buddhist religious context of release and should be read within that framework.