Named your fear must be before banish you can.
~ Yoda, in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, (2005 novel)
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Banish it →
Friendship →
Friendship is born at the moment when one person says to another: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
~ C.S. Lewis
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Hard choices →
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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The game →
A little less arrogant →
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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Being alive →
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.
~ Joseph Campbell
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Pseudo-knowledge →
Zeal, dogmatism and idealism exist only because we are forever committing intellectual sins. We sin by attributing concrete significance to meaningless pseudo-knowledge; We sin in being too lazy to think in terms of multiple causation and indulging instead in over-simplification, over-generalization and over-abstraction; And we sin by cherishing the false but agreeable notion that conceptual knowledge and, above all, conceptual pseudo-knowledge are the same as understanding.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Frenzy and distraction →
True fortitude is seen in great exploits, that justice warrants and that wisdom guides. All else is towering phrensy and distraction.
~ Joseph Addison
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Concrete ignorance →
Living amphibiously, half in fact and half in words, half in immediate experience and half in abstract notions, we contrive most of the time to make the worst of both worlds. We use language so badly that we became the slaves of our clichés and are turned either into conforming Babbits or into fanatics and doctrinairs. And we use immediate experience so badly that we become blind to the realities of our own nature and insensitive to the universe around us. The abstract knowledge which words bring us is paid for by concrete ignorance.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Fruit of these teachings →
What is the fruit of these teachings? Only the most beautiful and proper harvest of the truly educated—tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom. We should not trust the masses who say that only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.
~ Epictetus
Elsewhere, this is 4a591. — slipbox