Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 15, 2025
All this tended to make Tiberius more gloomy and distrustful, and when his mother Livia died he had no one to keep him in check, but fell under the influence of a man named Sejanus, who managed all his affairs for him, while he lived in a villa in the island of Capreæ in the Bay of Naples, seeing hardly any but a few intimates, given up to all sorts of evil luxuries and self-indulgences, and hating and dreading every one.
He wanted to free the spirits of these boys to whom he talked; wanted to show them that spirits could free themselves, indicate to them that self-control and self-development carried one to pleasures which sordid self-indulgences had no power to bestow. It was a question of getting the most from life. It was a matter of happiness.
There are many petty self-indulgences which, if continually practised, can do great and irreparable harm in undermining the will. Every man or woman knows his own little weaknesses best, but that which leads to the greatest harm is the excuse, "It is my temperament; if I were not tardy, or irritable, or untidy," or whatever it may be, "I would not be myself."
Whenever he did come, he sat mostly with Philip, over whom he had gradually established a remarkable influence, not by any definite acts or speeches, but rather by the stoicism of his own mode of life, coupled with a proud or laughing contempt for certain vices and self-indulgences to which it was evident that he himself felt no temptation.
He says that strait is the gate that leads to eternal life. Many there are who seek to widen it; they will tell you that such and such self-indulgences are but venial offences that this and that worldly compliance is excusable and even necessary.
The man whose imprudences and self-indulgences have made his liver slothful, his stomach rebellious, and wrecked his constitution in other ways, may probably does become an exasperating little tyrant, full of all manner of petty selfishness, which saps the comfort of others, as acid vapors corrode metals, but does that make him a 'scoundrel? Opinions vary.
Now, it was that his life was ruined, and that all through its course this crime would hang like a millstone about his neck. There could be no more enjoyment of anything for him; all the little pleasures and little self-indulgences which till now had delighted him were spoiled and rendered impossible.
Likely enough, if you really knew yourself saw your own dim character, perpetually at the mercy of its environment; your true motives, stripped for inspection and measured against eternal values; your unacknowledged self-indulgences; your irrational loves and hates you would be compelled to remodel your whole existence, and become for the first time a practical man.
He said the last, not in the spirit of apology, for rarely does your frontiersman consider that his self-indulgences require palliation, but rather after the manner of one purveying news of mild interest, as he would inform you that his surcingle had broken or that he had witnessed a lynching. "What made them jump your claim?" "I don't know.
"It it might have been life.... It is only when a moment, a moment like this comes that the quality of what we have lived seems so tarnished, that the atmosphere which we ourselves have helped to make is so sordid. When I think of the intrigues, and divorces, the self-indulgences, when I think of my own marriage " her voice caught. "How are we going to better it, Hugh, this way?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking