Here's a great quote from William Gerhardie:

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The art of living is the ability to subordinate minor motives to major ones. And it's an unsatisfactory art.

You must make up your mind what you want, and when you have made up your mind what you want, you might as well -- for all the difference it makes to you -- have never had a mind to make up. For consequences have a way of getting out of hand and laying out the motives indiscriminately.

And then *you* with your intent and will seem rather "in the way."

And that is the truth.
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Rings absolutely true... but I think only in terms of the most popular style of Living, or facet of Living: that having to do with accomplishment, security, survival, accumulation of wealth and achievement... He did come of age in Bourgeois Czarist Russia, which would focus him on a particular type of Life Art.

As opposed to the popular and momentarily funner beer-drinkin, job-losing, bail-posting approach.