Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Mark Twain
PROMPT: Quote
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Category Archives: Philosophy of Life
FIVE WISE LINES [August 2026]
One can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge,
Michel de montaigne
but one cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and one must begin anew.
Julio Cortázar
Experience is not what happens to you,
Aldous Huxley
it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.s. Eliot
If we do not possess a ‘sense’ for a given energy -form,
Robert E. Ornstein in The psychology of consciousness [As quoted in the Bihar School edition of Hatha Yoga Pradipika]
we do not experience its existence.
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PROMPT: Life-Changing Tip
Recognize that your experience of the world is not the world, itself. You have tremendous (potentially complete) control over the former, but virtually no control over the latter. #SakshiBhava
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PROMPT: Reason
No. I do not think everything happens for a reason, but I do think it is beneficial to see the positive in challenging life events. Both approaches serve to keep one from feeling victimized by life, but the latter doesn’t require that one believe in some grand architect twiddling the dials on one’s life events — and isn’t a Panglossian rationalization.
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Your Own Way
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PROMPT: Actually Kept?
Daily writing prompt
What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
I must say the “actually” in this prompt feels a bit accusatory and judgmental — as though, as a matter of practice, the answerer is generally unreliable. It also sounds like a question for someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder — otherwise who is making promises to whom? I am either one being or I contain multitudes, there being two seems at once too crowded and too lonely.
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Surrender
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Strange Planet
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PROMPT: Feel Bad
Daily writing prompt
What app eats up most of your screen time — and do you even feel bad about it?
Kindle Reader. Do people engage in habitual activities that they feel bad about? I understand the occasional excessive pile of ice cream or hedonistic cheeseburger, but continually doing something one feels bad about seems self-rectifying.
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PROMPT: Outdated Technology
We’d be better off if the bleeding edge of weapon technology were the pointy stick — not just because of atrocities averted. Also, we’d all have to be more capable in such a world — there is no imposter syndrome among people who have to kill a deer or fish with a spear they hewed themselves. Also, if you are cheesed off with one or more people (or the world,) it is entirely different (and more calming) decision space if one has to go out spearing them individually than if one can spray them with automatic fire from 50 feet away. You’d still have the option, but you’d have to want it more and to accept the inevitability of consequence more fully. Finally, it is quite hard to run an authoritarian dictatorship if your army has weapons of similar capability to any random person.
I don’t know for sure whether “an armed society is a polite society,” but I suspect it is if the pointy stick is the pinnacle of armaments.
I know this makes it sound like I was around in the pre-Bronze era. I was not.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 