Daily writing prompt
Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
“To make something special, you just have to BELIEVE it’s special.” So sayeth Goose to Panda.
PROMPT: Special Dish
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Category Archives: quotes
FIVE WISE LINES [November 2024]
Inspiration enters at the border between hard work and laziness.
Lu juren in “Poets’ jade splinters” [Trans. by Barnstone and Ping in The ART Of Writing]
I will not own anything that will one day be a valuable antique.
Miyamoto musashi in “My way of walking alone” [Dokkōdō] (Trans. by Teruo machida)
A house full of gold and jade can’t be guarded.
Laozi in the DAo De jing [Ch. 9]
Writing is a struggle between presence and absence.
Lu ji in The ART of Writing [Trans. by Barnstone and ping]
The best leaders remain unknown; the next best are praised; the next best are feared, and the worst are mocked.
Laozi in dAo de Jing [Ch.17]
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FIVE WISE LINES [October 2024]
If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred
walt whitman; Leaves of grass; “I sing the body electric”
Strong in their softness are the sprays of the wisteria creeper;
Saying of Master Jukyo as Translated by Trevor Leggett in Zen and the Ways
The pine in its hardness is broken by the weak snow.
When there is mutual ignorance, confidence indeed is king.
Trevor leggett; Zen and the Ways
Do not see the gate and think it is the house. The house is something which is reached by passing through and going beyond the gate.
YAgyu Munenori’s Art of War (As translated by trevor leggett in Zen and the ways)
Students of the Ways must see clearly that in an untrained man the intellect is like a barrister. It argues clearly and logically, but the aim is not truth, but to reach a predetermined conclusion.
Trevor Leggett; Zen and the Ways
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Five Wise Lines [September 2024]
No country has ever benefited from a long war.
Sūnzi’s art of war (孙子兵法,) ch. 2
Humans are good intuitive grammarians but poor intuitive statisticians.
Daniel kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow
The highest form of leadership is to attack the enemy’s plans; the next highest is to attack the cohesion of their forces; the next is to attack their troops, and the worst is to besiege their cities.
Sūnzi’s Art of war (孙子兵法,) Ch.3
Laziness is built deep into our nature.
Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow
War is the Way of deception.
Sūnzi’s Art of war (孙子兵法), Ch. 1
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Five Wise Lines (August 2024)
Empires arise from chaos, and empires collapse back into chaos. This we have known since time began.
The romance of the three kingdoms by luo guanzhong
Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.
Jerome k. jerome; “On being hard up”
The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him…
Sun tzu; The art of war
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
Jerome k. Jerome; “On being idle”
The wise man, like a child, can be filled with wonder at anything.
Tibetan proverb
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Five Wise Lines [June 2024]
The man who says to me, “Believe as I do, or God will damn thee,” will presently say, “Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate thee.”
Voltaire, in On superstition
The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
The translation of a poem having any depth ends by being one of two things: Either it is the expression of the translator, virtually a new poem, or it is as it were a photograph, as exact as possible, of one side of the statue.
Ezra pound
The people are of supreme importance to the ruler,
Chinese adage
food is of supreme importance to the people.
All translators face two choices: leave the reader in peace and drag the author closer, or leave the author in peace and drag the reader closer.
Friedrich schleiermacher (1768-1834)
[Referenced in Twenty-Nine GOODBYES, ed. by timothy billings]
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Five Wise Lines (March 2024)
We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or someone’s intention.
Daniel kahneman; Thinking, Fast and slow
If you win, do not boast of your victory; if you lose, do not be discouraged. When it is safe, do not become careless; when it is dangerous, do not fear. Simply continue down the path ahead.
Kanō Jigorō; Founder of Jūdō
A writer makes new life in the void, knocks on silence to make a sound, binds space and time on a sheet of silk and pours out a river from an inch-sized heart.
Lu Ji; Wen Fu (261 – 303)
The worst kind of Virtue never stops striving for Virtue, and so never achieves Virtue.
Laozi
Moonlight floods the whole sky from horizon to horizon. // How much it can fill your room depends on its windows.
Rumi
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Five Wise Lines (February 2024)
“If one conforms to the world,
Kamo no Chōmei, Hōjōki; [Stavros Trans.]
He’s bound to suffer.
If he doesn’t,
He’s considered mad.
But nothing ever bores me. So much the worse for those who are moulded of boredom.
Salvador Dalí, Hidden Faces
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise pascal
I am in no way interested in immortality, but only in the taste of tea.
Lú Tóng (Poet of the Tang Era)
The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is remedied.
John Dewey
Bonus Quote:
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus tullius cicero
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Five Wise Lines (Jan 2024)
Every so often I run into a sentence that blows my mind a little bit. Here are a few recent examples:
We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
William james
One must read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles to be an educated man.
Old chinese adage (As Translated by ha jin in The Banished Immortal)
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
Carl Sandburg
Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing.
Ludwig wittgenstein
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
John stuart mill
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Five Wise Lines from In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?
But our thoughts do not travel to what we cannot see. The unseen for us does not exist.
This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.
I wonder if my readers know the color of that ‘darkness seen by candlelight.’ It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fire ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow.
Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of light and shadow.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 