I’ve been skimming the surface with the French language for eleven months now. Eleven months of daily lessons on the Duolingo app, making sure I hit the bare minimum and some days a little bit more. And as you might expect I’ve learned the basic words that they repeat in their lessons, struggle a bit…
“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there’s another force from inside battling to make us something else.” – Nadine Gordimer I don’t…
“Opinions are like nails: the stronger you hit them, the deeper inside they go.” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis Or maybe in 2020 it’s “the more you express them the more your friends mute you on Facebook”. Or look at you funny when you see them in public. The lesson, I suppose, is to stop hammering…
“If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” – Michel de Montaigne “If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say “no”.When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be…
“November retained its name (from the Latin novem meaning “nine”) when January and February were added to the Roman calendar.” – Wikipedia And there it is: November. I’ve wondered about October before. I mean, “octo” is eight yet October was the tenth month. I hadn’t thought much about the origin of November until I stared…
“The explorer returned to his people, who were eager to know about the Amazon. But how could he ever put into words the feelings that flooded his heart when he saw exotic flowers and heard the night-sounds of the forest; when he sensed the danger of wild beasts or paddled his canoe over treacherous rapids?…
“Process saves us from the poverty of intentions.” – Elizabeth King (via Seth Godin & Tim Ferriss) “You begin with a subject, gather material, and work your way to structure from there. You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them, not the other way around.”…
“C’est une prévoyance très nécessaire de sentir qu’on ne peut tout prévoir.”(“It is a very necessary forethought to feel that you cannot foresee everything.”) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau Prévoyance. The word tantalizes me, capturing my imagination, tauntingly just out of reach. It’s a French word, essentially translating basically to “foreseeability”. Prévoyance is powerful when applied to…
“A lot of people don’t want to pick up the new skills that are necessary, or they don’t want to, for example, physically move, or they don’t want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships. So everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants…
“The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and a thousand other things well.” It happens this way, that I’ll pick up some random quote such as the one above, plucked from a James Clear newsletter, and immediately I feel compelled to hunt down the source. In this case Hugh…
