Believing ourselves to be ...

Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.
 Octavio Paz

More phrases

Don't settle in the land of barely enough. That is where you are, it is not who you are. That's your location, it's not your identity. No matter what it looks like, have an abundant mentality.
The by-product is that they more people you help, the "richer" you become, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and definitely financially.
 T. Harv Eker
Happiness doesn't depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Quotes from the same author

The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the Press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it he cannot grow or mature.
 Octavio Paz
Death is the mother of forms.
 Octavio Paz
Contemporary man has rationalized the myths, but he has not been able to destroy them.
 Octavio Paz
If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.
 Octavio Paz
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity.
 Octavio Paz