Five Wise Lines [April 2024]

Diogenes Sitting in His Tub by Jean-Leon Gerome (1860)

Of what use for us is a man who, although he has long practiced philosophy, has never upset anyone?

Diogenes of sinope on Plato, according to themistius

The superstition that we must drive from the Earth is that which, making a tyrant of God, invites men to become tyrants.

Voltaire in On Superstition

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual talent

What’s the difference between a king and a poor man if they would both end the same bundle of white bones.

Zhuangzi

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Carl sagan (Note: There are variations on this quote that long predate Sagan’s)

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

You live off the crumbs that fall from the festive table of my genius.

Kurban Said in Ali and Nino [Not so much wisdom as a wicked burn]

To roam Giddily and be everywhere, but at home, Such freedom doth a banishment become.

John donne in a Poetic letter to rowland woodward

Lions are not the slaves of those who feed them, it is the feeders, rather, who are the lion’s slaves. For fear is the mark of a slave, and wild beasts make men fearful.

Diogenes the cynic

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

“On Laozi” by Bai Juyi [w/ Audio]

"The ignorant speak, while the wise keep silent."
I read the words of Laozi.
But if Laozi knew the Way,
Why did he write those five thousand characters?

Five Wise Lines (February 2024)

“If one conforms to the world,
He’s bound to suffer.
If he doesn’t,
He’s considered mad.

Kamo no Chōmei, Hōjōki; [Stavros Trans.]

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

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

PROMPT: Gift

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

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]

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

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

Daily writing prompt
What principles define how you live?

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.