Strength is necessary to overcome others
power is necessary to overcome oneself.

Being content with what one already has is wealth.
Violence may achieve a quick result
but nothing permanent.
Stay in place, content with what you have,
to live a long life.
Death is a return to the native elements.

In the Middle Ages the mountains of southern Switzerland and France prevented the people living in them from continuous access to fresh fish and sea salt carrying iodine, causing frequent thyroid problems and mental deficiency among the poor. Children who were born with this problem were mentally retarded: slow learners and ignorant of the complexities of good and evil and sin. They were, in fact, such gentle and kind people that other "normal" people called them "christian," or créstin / creitin in the alpine Swiss French, shortened to cretin in the English. Today, in a Euro-American culture that grew out of the Christianity of the Middle Ages, a cretin is a mental idiot and is used, by extension, as a supreme insult against those whose intelligence we question.
But in an earlier time, in a far-away land,
where metaphysics were sublime,
ignorance was the epitome of Christianity.