Tag 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.

Five Wise Lines from In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

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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.

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!

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.

Five Wise Lines from Ben Franklin

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Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

Never ruin an apology with an excuse.

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.

Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.

Never confuse Motion with Action.

And Five Honorable Mentions:

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few his precepts!

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Tis a great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults; greater to tell him his.

Five Wise Lines from Fireflies by Rabindranath Tagore

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In the drowsy dark caves of the mind / dreams build their nest with fragments / dropped from day’s caravan.

From the solemn gloom of the temple / children run out to sit in the dust, / God watches them play / and forgets the priest.

The wind tries to take the flame by storm / only to blow it out.

The same sun is newly born in new lands / in a ring of endless dawns.

When death comes and whispers to me, / “Thy days are ended.” / let me say to him, “I have lived in love / and not in mere time.” / He will ask, “Will thy songs remain?” / I shall say, “I know not, but this I know / that often when I sang I found my eternity.

Fireflies by Rabindranath Tagore is in the public domain and can be read at sites such as:

Fireflies is available at PoetryVerse