If you could go back in time and give your younger self advice, what would it be?
Don’t be an ass!
PROMPT: Your Younger Self
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Tag Archives: Wisdom
FIVE WISE LINES [October 2026]
You can never plan the future by the past.
Edmund burke
In the garden of gentle sanity,
Chögyam Trungpa; Timely Rain
may you be bombarded by
coconuts of wakefulness
…the most fruitful developments
Werner heisenberg
frequently take place at those points
where two different lines of thought meet.
My miracle is that when I feel hungry I eat, and when I feel thirsty I drink.
Bankei (Upon being challenged to produce a miracle during his lecture at Ryumon-ji Temple)
We cannot catch the fleeting minute
Arthur Milne
and put it alongside a later minute.
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PROMPT: Know
What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?
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I believe the distinction between knowledge and wisdom is that one merely needs to be able to understand knowledge, but one must be able to live wisdom. For example, one can teach a five-year-old Jesus’ lesson about turning the other cheek, and they may understand every word but still be struggling to live it sixty years later.
My point is that I’m doubtful that knowing anything would have saved me pain because I would have had to live it, and that takes time, experience, and struggle.
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FIVE WISE LINES [September 2026]
Luck, diligence, spontaneity, and inspiration
Mary oliver; A Poetry Handbook
are all needed to write a poem.
…above all let us never accept as cause for what we do not comprehend something we comprehend even less.
Marquis de sade; Juliette
…wise people don’t tell us what to do;
david brooks; How to know a person
they start by witnessing our story.
The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,
Hunter s. thompson; The Rum Diary
but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh.
We do not see things as they are,
Anaïs Nin
we see them as we are.
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PROMPT: Past Self
Daily writing prompt
If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?
“You’re living in a dream world, a simulation, nothing is real.”
Can’t really change anything (see: Novikov Self-Consistency Principle) and I don’t believe people can enact wisdom until they are ready (i.e. whispering wise words in the ear will not make a wiser person,) and so I’m left with fucking with ourself.
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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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FIVE WISE LINES [July 2026]
Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.
Sufi Saying
[S]ome day you will be old enough to
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe
start reading fairy tales again.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Mahatma gandhi
Learn as if you were to live forever.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael,
Pablo Picasso
but a lifetime to paint like a child.
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FIVE WISE LINES [May 2026]
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest hemingway; A Moveable feast
Friends do not live in harmony…, but in melody.
Henry david thoreau
Avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.
Robert Hass’ paraphrasing of Bashō [National Geographic; Feb 2008]
Do not hurry; do not rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be careful of your words,
Lieh Tzu
for someone will agree with them.
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PROMPT: Movies or TV Series
Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Hustle, and The Matrix. Together, they contain the sum of all wisdom.
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Baby Monkey Wisdom [Kyōka]
the fixed boulder
makes great shelter;
rolling boulders
make monkey paste:
how do baby monkeys know?
