Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead…
Colm Doherty: I just have this tremendous sense of time slipping away from me, Pádraic. And I think I need to spend the time I have left thinking and composing. Just trying not to listen to any more of the dull things that you have to say for yourself.Pádraic Súlleabhain: Are you dying?Colm Doherty: No,…
A visit to Walden Pond can be immersive, if you go at the right time. Many people go in summer to swim and enjoy the pristine water. Many fish for large mouth bass and other prizes. But the pilgrims go to visit Henry David Thoreau’s famous pond and the woods surrounding it. I’ve watched the…
“The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have…
“Qué lindo es soñar despierto, he says. How lovely it is to dream while you are awake. Dream while you’re awake Andre. Anybody can dream while they’re asleep, but you need to dream all the time, and say your dreams out loud, and believe in them.” — Andre Agassi, quoting Gil Reyes, Open: An Autobiography…
“Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.” — Henry David Thoreau “If you want to be happy, be.” – Leo Tolstoy “Happiness is transient, but meaning abides.” — James Hollis We are all in the process of becoming whatever it is we’ll evolve into next. Blogging documents much of my own…
“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.” — Henry David Thoreau I frequently tout the value of each day, going to great lengths to remind myself…
“Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.” — Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle Thoreau’s Life Without Principle is a quick read, but well worth the hour or so it takes to digest it. As with anything in life, the question is, what do we want to…
“Men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.” — Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle I’d recently fallen back into a cycle of drinking coffee from a K-cup. There was a lot happening in my life, and it was a fast way to…
“It matters not where or how far you travel—the farther commonly the worse—but how much alive you are.” — Henry David Thoreau Sitting outside, listening to birdsong in the magic hour before the world shook the cobwebs off, I watched a couple of large birds fluttering tree-to-tree. I wondered at them, thinking perhaps pileated woodpeckers…