Sincerity

You will fail. No matter what, you will fail. No matter what you intend to do, you will do it wrong. But you are not, I repeat NOT, a failure. The key to sincerity is to realize this. The sincere person is not unfailing, they are unfaltering.

How often do people say “I don’t know what made me do that!”? It comes from a common fiction that your powers of reason are who you are, and that a “well reasoned” argument is a sincere one. It’s an absurd notion, but still very commonly held. With very strong reason, I can give an argument for why it would be appropriate for me to torture myself to death, at least in theory. It isn’t our powers of reason that keeps us from doing things like that.

Sincerity is being true to yourself, which leads to knowing yourself.

“As you put into practice the qualities of patience, punctuality, sincerity, and solicitude, you will have a better opinion of the world around you” Grenville Kleiser (American author 1868-1953)

“No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself” James Russell Lowell (American Poet, Critic, Essayist, Editor and Diplomat, 1819-1891)