If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.
An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. Thus, we have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all. How then to envision the future, and establish our direction, without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty?
You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse.
It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes, courageously, and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible – even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness, and half-blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us.
It’s time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions. It’s time to let go. It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.
The idea that human life can be free of moral concerns is a fantasy.
If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It’s an embodied sensation, not a thought.
The fact that a symphony ends does not mean it was not worth listening to.
Order is the Shire of Tolkien’s hobbits: peaceful, productive and safely inhabitable, even by the naive. Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent.
And why does it so often seem to be the very people standing so visibly against prejudice who so often appear to feel obligated to denounce humanity itself?
People are very tough. People can survive through much pain and loss. But to persevere they must see the good in Being. If they lose that, they are truly lost.
The present can change the past, and the future can change the present.
Competence beats obedience.
The things you can see, with even a single open eye. It’s no wonder that people want to stay blind.
If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal. More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, “What if my current ambition is in error?” He treats it, instead, as the Absolute. It becomes his God, for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states, and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition.
I think often people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless because that’s a better conclusion to come to than the reverse; because if life is meaningless, well then, who cares what you do? But if life is meaningful – if what you do matters... then everything you do matters. And that puts a terrible responsibility on the individual. And I think that people are generally unwilling to bear that.
It’s also unlikely that you’re playing only one game. You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits.
There is a terrible reptilian predator, metaphorically speaking, pursuing you all the time, just like the crocodile with the ticktock of time emanating from the clock he swallowed chasing the tyrannical coward Captain Hook.
Power just means I can hurt you, and you can’t hurt me back. That’s not what you need from a ruler, even though it devolves into that from time to time. What you want is the kind of wisdom that illuminates the darkness.