A certain amount of creativity and rebellion must be tolerated – or welcomed, depending on your point of view – to maintain the process of regeneration. Every rule was once a creative act, breaking other rules.
Humility: It is better to presume ignorance and invite learning than to assume sufficient knowledge and risk the consequent blindness.
These individuals tend to be profoundly ignorant of the complex realities of the status quo, unconscious of their own ignorance, and ungrateful for what the past has bequeathed to them.
Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.
Consider then that the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering is a good. Make that an axiom: to the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.
We are all human. That means there is something about our experience that is the same. Otherwise, we would not all be human.
Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
I’m not a fan of Positive Psychology, by the way, because happiness is basically extroversion minus neuroticism, and we knew that 15 years ago.
El destino obliga a todos los miembros de la raza humana a comprender su aislamiento, su individualidad, su sometimiento abyecto a las duras condiciones de la existencia mortal.
Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back.
The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.
Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.
But there will be times in your life when it will take everything you have to face what is in front of you, instead of hiding away from a truth so terrible that the only thing worse is the falsehood you long to replace it with.
There is no evidence that the importance of friendship declines in any manner with age.
What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth.
An artist constantly risks falling fully into chaos, instead of transforming it.
When the medication causes the disease, a positive feedback loop has been established.
There is no enlightened one. There is only the one who is seeking further enlightenment. Proper Being is process, not a state; a journey, not a destination.
We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.
What will you write with your pen of light?