When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.
It is necessary to be strong in the face of death, because death is intrinsic to life. It is for this reason that I tell my students: aim to be the person at your father’s funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity.
Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Here’s a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical – even legal – equivalent of Occam’s razor, the scientist’s conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.
Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.
There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.
It is better, proverbially, to rule your own spirit than to rule a city.
But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions – and there’s nothing freeing about that.
Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.
We require rules, standards, values – alone and together. We’re pack animals, beasts of burden. We must bear a load, to justify our miserable existence.
That’s poetic in its malevolence.
The first: limit the rules. The second: Use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.
There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together.
We cannot navigate without something to aim at, and while we are in this world, we must always navigate.
I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.
When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.
It isn’t precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.
If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward.
There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.