“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See Sometimes we get frustrated by the forces seemingly aligned against us. I thought by now I’d have lived in a Paris studio apartment for a summer writing a novel. That seemed a far…
“The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them….
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem likeWhen he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back. When the time has passed to…
“Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.” — Thomas Mann “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle This business of repeatedly doing is leading somewhere, with our destination highly dependent on what we repeatedly do. Such…
“I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out…
“When you go through life with preferences but don’t let your happiness depend on any one of them, then you’re awake. You’re moving toward wakefulness. Wakefulness, happiness—call it what you wish—is the state of nondelusion, where you see things not as you are but as they are, insofar as this is possible for a human…
“Real power is not in momentary desires, but in complete calmness.” – Leo Tolstoy I have a bit of nervous energy as I write this. I’m traveling tomorrow for the first time in seven months and there’s a vibrating exhilaration deep inside knowing that I’m getting on a plane again, going to another state and…
“When a person tries to apply his intellect to the question “Why do I exist in this world?” he becomes dizzy. The human intellect cannot find the answers to such questions. What does this mean? This means that our intellect is not given to us to find a solution for this question. Our intellect can…
I’m bouncing again, book-to-book, pulling this book off the shelf, scanning over that sentence on the Kindle app, and stacking the pile higher. It’s funny how one thing sparks another thing, it’s what Robert Maynard Hutchins called The Great Conversation, written work building on written work, theory built on theory, across time, but shrunken down…