7 for Sunday is a weekly serving of 7 things for you to savor. — It’s an email containing my reflections on interesting things I find laying about, seasoned with some quotes from my collection. See https://7forsunday.com/.
Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up in your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter. And lead pencil markings endure longer than memory.
~ Jack London
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Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
~ Howard H. Aiken
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Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
~ George S. Patton
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What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.
~ Hal Boyle
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Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices means never retiring, because the brain has to be engaged in finding new solutions in the moment, not just remembering old formulas. Hard choices makes us wiser, smarter, stronger, and wealthier, and easy choices reverse our progress, focusing our energies on comfort or entertainment. In every difficult moment ask yourself, “What is a hard choice, and what is an easy choice?” and you will know instantly what is right.
~ Jerzy Gregorek
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It’s important to take time to think about what we’re reading and not merely assume the thoughts of the author. We need to digest, synthesize, and organize the thoughts of others if we are to understand. This is the grunt work of thinking. It’s how we acquire wisdom.
~ Shane Parrish from, A Meditation on Reading
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That’s a tiny taste from a delightful and sublime collection of thoughts on reading and books. Which will serve perfectly as an on-ramp to Schopenhauer’s actual essay, On Reading and Books. Which, furthermore, is even linked as a modern PDF from that same page. Wonders never cease.
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The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Why are their pleasures uneasy? Because the motives upon which they are founded are not stable and they totter with the frivolity which gave them birth. … Laboriously they attain what they desire, anxiously they hold what they have attained, and in the meanwhile irrecoverable time is not taken into consideration.
~ Seneca
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Books? How, or to what end? For is not reading a kind of preparation for living, but living itself made up of things other than books? It is as if an athlete, when he enters the stadium, should break down and weep because he is not exercising outside. This is what you were exercising for; this is what the jumping-weights, and the sand, and your young partners were all for. So are you now seeking for these, when it is the time for action?
~ Epictetus
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Does the road wind uphill all the way?
~ Christina Rossetti
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
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There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
~ David Eagleman
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Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer
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Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.
~ Naval Ravikant
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The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
~ Bob Dylan
The slow one now, will later be fast
As the present now, will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now, will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’
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At the mid-point of the path through life, I found myself lost in a wood so dark, the way ahead was blotted out. The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say how harsh and bitter that place felt to me —
~ Dante
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If progress is real despite our whining, it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being. The heritage rises, and man rises in proportion as he receives it.
~ Will and Ariel Durant from, Is Human Progress Real or An Illusion?
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So much is written and discussed about history: recording it, studying it, learning (or not) from it, does it repeat or rhyme, etc.. But why don’t more people talk about each of our personal histories? The most important thing— The thing I unequivocally must do, and must do first, is to take care of myself. (“Put on your own oxygen mask before attempting to assist others.”) I must put myself first. I must be the change I want to see in the world. Only if I am healthy, empowered, and vigrously prepared can I sally forth to do good things.
Certainly, I can work on myself by studying humanity’s history for lessons. You know what works better? Studying my history, because there are so many questions I can usefully ask of myself. What couldn’t I accomplish if I spent decades studying my own history and studying humanity’s?
That would be real progress.
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But the unintended consequence of, what one might call, total brand and business control, is that it diverts attention away from the most essential part of any creative profession. You know, making great stuff.
It’s hard to do that under ideal circumstances; harder still when you’re tweeting or visualizing your next Instagram story or flying to some industry conference.
~ Ryan Holiday from, Your Work Is the Only Thing That Matters | by Ryan Holiday | Human Parts
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The only thing better than finding something worth sharing is not realizing who the author is until after deciding to share it. Holiday—I’ve just learned—also writes on Medium, and I didn’t recognize the site title, nor his style. But that’s not my main thrust today…
An artist’s job is to create masterpieces. Period.
~ as above
Usually I’m all like: My latest podcast episode isn’t downloaded a million times? “Nobody loves me.” Paltry likes on Instagram? “Nobody loves me.” My LinkedIn post gets ignored? “Nobody loves me.” No new weekly email list signups? “Nobody loves me.” …ahem.
But sometimes I manage to remember to just. do. the. work. And then all’s right as rain.
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Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the things around us. A grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.
~ Marcus Aurelius
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Operatics, combat and confusion. Sloth and servility. Every day they blot out those sacred principles of yours—which you day-dream thoughtlessly about, or just let slide. Your actions and perceptions need to aim: at accomplishing practical ends; at the exercise of thought; at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.
~ Marcus Aurelius
When will you let yourself enjoy straightforwardness? Seriousness? Or understanding individual things—their nature and substance, their place in the world, their life span, their composition, who can possess them, whose they are to give and to receive?
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Controlling the mind doesn’t take one to freedom. Controlling the mind adds another link to one’s shackles.
~ Wu Hsin
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