you can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors

Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others.

When negative energy finds you, never fight back. If you do, you become it.

The enemy is in you, but it is not you.

Without a defined enemy, some people wouldn’t know how to get through the day. When there’s no enemy, they make one. An enemy does not occur naturally. Animals may have conflict but it is survival motivated. It is Homo sapiens who seek out others and hit them until they hit back. It is as old as the first line drawn in the sand. Isn’t it easier to fight than think?

Each of us is the enemy [...] to the other and to himself. That's what I mean: I'm the enemy within myself. Unless I master that enemy, I always lose.

You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you. The flaw? Explosive emotional reaction out of all proportion to the occasion. Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself — in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements.

Think again, Electra. Don't say anymore. Don't you see what you're doing? You make your own pain. Why keep wounding yourself? With so much evil stored up in that cold dark soul of yours you breed enemies everywhere you touch.

It amounts to a diseased attitude — a conditioned reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority.

Nothing external to you has any power over you.

إن ألد أعدائك هو جهازك العصبي، وما يعتمل في نفسك من توتر قد يورّطك في عمل لا تحمد عقباه.

He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

That’s what you are. Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.