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Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness. [3]

tiny gods

it matters what vibes you spread, it matters which tiny gods you make more real through worship [4]

We make the world real through actions that open the heart. [5]

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. [6]

follow your bliss

If what you are following is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you. -Joseph Campbell

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. – Richard Feynman

What humans need and want isn’t a complete release of tension and responsibility, but the pursuit of a worthwhile goal that they chose freely. –Viktor Frankl

We act as though comfort and luxury are the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. -Albert Einstein?

No good life is possible unless it is organized around a vocation. -David Brooks

Men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful. They must, therefore, be returned to participation in such enterprises. -Kurt Vonnegut

It is a disgrace to grow old through sheer carelessness before seeing what manner of man you may become by developing your bodily strength and beauty to their highest limit. But you cannot see that, if you are careless; for it will not come of its own accord. [7]

It is in this gesture of "going beyond", to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All other things follow as a matter of course. -Alexander Grothendieck

You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you. -Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer. -Jim Carey

We're here for such a short period of time. Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you. -Jeff Bridges

The totality of you, the wisdom that’s embodied in the totality of you, far outstrips rationality. And if you listen to yourself, and do the difficult things that your self tells you to do, the idea is you don’t have to compute the utopian future because it’s following whatever you tell yourself to do every moment is the best path to whatever the best outcome is...

Where are you headed? You don’t know. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be headed somewhere. Follow your moral intuitions. Stop doing the things that make you feel weak....

So you have to see what it is that you find meaningful, whatever that is. And then you have to fight for it. You have to fight against yourself, you have to fight against other people because what do they know about it? You have to fight against nature maybe even to stand up for what it is that sustains you. And that takes courage. It also takes honesty. Partly because if you’re not honest you can’t trust your own intuitions. And this is an important thing. Think about this and this is why virtue is a necessity....

So I would say try to find out what’s good for you. Just watch. Don’t listen to anybody else. Or maybe you should. Maybe they’ll give you some hints, you know. But you’ve got to sort it out for yourself. And when you find out what’s good for you and what isn’t, do the things that are good for you. Until you like being alive, until you’re thrilled to be alive. See what happens.

And I would also suggest there’s nothing you could possibly do that will be more profound and useful than that. [8]

feeling one's way in

Einfühlung, in isolation, is not a bad idea. What Herder meant by “feeling one’s way in” was that for a historian to understand a particular society, one must grasp on both an intellectual and emotional level the cultural currents of the time. One cannot just look from outside the fishbowl using the scorecards of the moment and judge a society from some modern, abstract, standard. You must dive in and understand people and cultures on their own terms first. This is something the best historians do. They make the reader feel like they understand why people did the things they did without the benefit of knowing how events turned out. [9]

Almost No One is Evil. Almost Everything is Broken. [10]

Honesty without compassion is cruelty.

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. [11]

The goal of her shop: "To create an environment that healed." [12]

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. [13]

mask on

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -Kurt Vonnegut

I wear a mask. And that mask, it's not to hide who I am, but to create what I am. -Batman

It's not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me. -Batman

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth. -Oscar Wilde

real straight talk about souls

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk — real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious. -Jack Kerouac

I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt. -Before Sunrise

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. -Annie Dillard

If we cannot take joy in things that are merely real, our lives will always be empty. [14]

Gmorning
This feeling will pass.
This workload will pass.
These people will pass.
But look at you, with the gift of memory.
You can time travel to the good stuff just by closing your eyes & breathing.
Then come right back to now, eyes up for the good stuff ahead.
You magic thing. [15]

epoché [16]

I've always been a bit skeptical of the high status of chess champions, whom many consider intellectuals (rather than, say, sports stars). But in "Deep Thinking," Mr. Kasparov has changed my mind. He praises Mikhail Botvinnik, the founder of the Soviet chess school where he trained, for practicing an "intense regime of self-criticism." Chess champions are rewarded for brutal honesty about their habits and strategies. If only most tenured professors and business executives were this conscious of their limitations and blind spots. [17]

Experience has taught me that it is wrong and cruel to suspend judgment, that nonjudgmentalism is at best indifference to the suffering of others, at worst a disguised form of sadism. How can one respect people as members of the human race unless one holds them to a standard of conduct and truthfulness? How can people learn from experience unless they are told that they can and should change? One doesn't demand of laboratory mice that they do better: but man is not a mouse, and I can think of no more contemptuous way of treating people than to ascribe to them no more responsibility than such mice.

In any case, nonjudgmentalism is not really nonjudgmental. It is the judgment that, in the words of a bitter Argentinean tango, "todo es igual, nada es mejor": everything is the same, nothing is better. This is as barbaric and untruthful a doctrine as has yet emerged from the fertile mind of man. [18]

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize til you have tried to make it precise. [19]

Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses―especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else. -Leonardo da Vinci

misc

We're all kings now. -Josh Wolfe

So much of life is about the fine but important distinction between a "relationship" and a "quid pro quo". -Matt Levine

It is easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled.

In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World. -Scenes from a Marriage

The groves were God's first temples. [20]

Where do we lose good people? When they convince themselves that they’ve found The Answer — either in the form of a charismatic person or, more dangerously still, a charismatic idea — in a chaotic system where no Answer exists. A chaotic system like markets, yes, but also a chaotic system like politics.

The Answer is, by nature, totalitarian. Why? Because it’s a general closed-form solution. That’s the technical definition of The Answer, and that’s the practical definition of totalitarian thought. We’re hard-wired to want the all-encompassing algorithm, which is why it’s so difficult to resist. But if we care about liberty. If we care about justice. If we care about liberty and justice for all … we have to resist The Answer.

Because we’ve lost enough good people.

As wise as serpents, as harmless as doves … [21]

In any man's work, perfection is an elusive, ethereal goal, an idea that does constant battle with the daily grind. -David Simon

La relatividad de nuestra memoria que magnifica o empequeñece a discreción, un lenguaje que creemos conocer y que en la verdad no conocemos. -Roberto Bolano

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well. -Horace Walpole

The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel. -Horace Walpole

If it's happiness you're looking for, you probably aren't gonna find it in a darkened room in front of a few computer monitors. [22]

It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. -Mark Twain

A man acts as he is, when he can act as he wills. -Tom Shippey

Your peers are valuable people, and you should seek more than getting them to respect you. You should figure out why it is that you should truly respect them. That means actually understanding other people as unique individuals as well. We are all each a cosmic miracle of fantastic, almost impossible complexity. The architecture of each of our brains are marvelous cathedrals built by a billion years of evolution, minds of almost insignificant size in the scale of the universe, able to conceive of the very thing that created it, and yet also able to wonder about the score of a football game on Sunday or whether our ass looks big in this dress. This is remarkable. Each and every one of us is remarkable. This is what it means to be humble. To realize that we are each insignificant and yet each a remarkable work of art. [23]

Mayo’s work sheds light on the dark side of the “humanist” tradition in management theory. There is something undeniably creepy about a clipboard-bearing man hovering around a group of factory women, flicking the lights on and off and dishing out candy bars. All of that humanity—as anyone in my old firm could have told you—was just a more subtle form of bureaucratic control. It was a way of harnessing the workers’ sense of identity and well-being to the goals of the organization, an effort to get each worker to participate in an ever more refined form of her own enslavement. [24]

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Proust

Décomplexé - Pure, sure of oneself, lacking neurotic hangups or socio-cultural pressures. [25]

Perfection of character is this: Live each day as if it were your last without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense. -Marcus Aurelius

Creativity is making connections. [26]

Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but no one thinks of changing himself. -Leo Tolstoy

You know it's real when you are who you think you are. -Drake

The presence, absence, and orientation of objects in a crime scene take on a glowing significance equaled only in places of worship. -David Simon

Expectation, reputation, obligation — these are what make the self coalesce, and the more locked in those expectations and obligations become, the more solid the self feels. [27]

You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them. -Michael Jordan

The system is not your friend. The system is not your enemy. The system is a retarded giant throwing wads of $100 bills and books of rules in random directions while shouting “LOOK AT ME! I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” Sometimes by luck you catch a wad of cash, and you think the system loves you. Other times by misfortune you get hit in the gut with a rulebook, and you think the system hates you. But either one is giving the system too much credit.

Every one of the architects and leaders of the system is fantastically intelligent – some even have degrees from the University of [mumble]. But every one of the neurons in my dog’s brain is a fantastically complex pinnacle of three billion years of evolution, yet my dog herself can spend the better part of an hour standing motionless, hackles raised, barking at a plastic bag. [28]

Rule #1 of stupid people trying to make sense of the world: the culture you know nothing about has all the answers. [29]

To speak another language is to possess another soul. -Charlemagne

It is difficult to put in words, but easy to cry about. It is the paradoxical logic of why things in this world are beautiful. It responds to the question of where your heart is. It creates intimacy with distance. It is a memory of feelings. It is a space transformed into a place. It is a word only in Portuguese. It is here. Saudades.