Category Archives: wisdom

Five Wise Lines (Jan 2024)

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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

PROMPT: Gift

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What is the greatest gift someone could give you?

A better understanding of the world or how I can best operate within it.

“Happy the Man” by Horace; Translated by John Dryden [w/ Audio]

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Happy the man, and happy he alone,
 He who can call today his own:
 He who, secure within, can say,
 Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
 Be fair or foul, or rain or shine
 The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
 Not Heaven itself, upon the past has power,
 But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

If — by Rudyard Kipling [w/ Audio]

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If you can keep your head when all about you
   Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
 If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
   But make allowance for their doubting too;
 If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
   Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
 Or being hated don't give way to hating,
   And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
   If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim:
 If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
   And treat those two imposters just the same;
 If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
   Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
 Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
   And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
   And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
 And lose, and start again at your beginnings
   And never breathe a word about your loss;
 If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
   To serve your turn long after they are gone,
 And so hold on when there is nothing in you
   Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
   Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
 If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
   If all men count with you, but none too much;
 If you can fill the unforgiving minute
   With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
 Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
   And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

PROMPT: Holiday Invention

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Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Mad Saints Day. In honor of all the crazy sages throughout history (e.g. Hanshan, Diogenes the Cynic, Ikkyu, St. Isadora, Drukpa Kunley, Nasreddin, Milarepa, William Blake, etc.)

It’s celebrated by violating some societal convention that doesn’t have direct adverse health and safety consequences (This is not “The Purge.”) Of course, violating even the most absurdly arbitrary societal convention will cause many people to freak out, so the other element of celebrating Mad Saints Day is just getting the f@$& over it.

PROMPT: Risk

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What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to? 

Fully embrace the crazy, in the manner of Diogenes, Blake, or Drukpa Kunley.

Five Wise Lines from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

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The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature, a complete impossibility!

Algernon

Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn’t read.

ALgernon

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

Algernon

One has a right to Bunbury anywhere one chooses. Every serious Bunburyist knows that.

Algernon; [fyi: “Bunburying” is the use of appointments with ficticious individuals to get out of one’s duties and obligations.]

One should always eat muffins quite calmly.

Algernon

PROMPT: Principles

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Daily writing prompt
What principles define how you live?
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What happens in the external world does not DETERMINE one’s mental / emotional experience.

It’s better to see oneself as a student than as a master — at any stage of life and development.

Be tolerant. No one knows enough to justify smug superiority.

Self-expression is what we live for, and it is curtailed to everyone’s detriment.

Five Wise Lines from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

All art is quite useless.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are fascinating.

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

Five Wise Lines from Epicurus

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Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.

principal doctrines – No. 2

Nothing is enough to someone for whom what is enough is too little.

Vatican Sayings – No. 68

Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

Principal Doctrines – No. 27

Don’t spoil what you have by desiring what you don’t have; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.

vatican sayings – No. 35

No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but some pleasures are only obtainable at the cost of excessive troubles.

Principal doctrines – No. 8

And Five Honorable Mentions:

[T]here are an infinite number of worlds, some like this world, others unlike it.

Letter to Herodotus

Dreams have neither a divine nature nor a prophetic power, but they are the result of images that impact upon us.

vatican sayings – No. 24

It is pointless for a person to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

vatican sayings – No. 65

But one must not be so much in love with the explanation by a single way as wrongly to reject all others…

Letter to pythocles

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search thereof when he is grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

Letter to Menoeceus

SOURCE: Epicurus. 2021. The Fundamental Books of Epicurus: Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Letters. Trans. by: Robert Drew Hicks & R. Medeiros. Independently published on Amazon. 45pp.