Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
~ Franz Kafka
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Wisdom
An imaginary life
We are not satisfied with our real life. We want to live an imaginary life, a life in which we seem different in the eyes of other people than we are in reality.
~ Blaise Pascal
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Paying attention
To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
~ Viggo Mortensen
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Quite nice
[T]oday, let’s seek to be better than the things that disappoint or hurt us. Let’s try to be the example we’d like others to follow. It’s awful to be a cheat, to be selfish, to feel the need to inflict pain on our fellow human beings. Meanwhile, living morally and well is quite nice.
~ Ryan Holiday
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The way
The way to true knowledge does not go through soft grass covered with flowers. To find it, a person must climb steep mountains.
~ John Ruskin
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A bad example
Nothing is more harmful than a bad example set by others. They bring into our life notions which never would have occurred to us without an example.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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The moral
The moral? To recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather.
~ Alaine De Botton
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Have we become wiser?
We live in the age of philosophy, science, and intellect. Huge libraries are open for everyone. Everywhere we have schools, colleges, and universities which give us the wisdom of the people from many previous millennia. And what then? Have we become wiser for all this? Do we better understand our life, or the meaning of our existence? Do we know what is good for our life?
~ Jean Jacques Rousseau
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Three great things
The three great things of life are: Good health; Work; And a philosophy of life. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—Sincerity. Without this, the other three are without avail; And with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among giants.
~ Jack London
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A sneer
A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil’s weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.
~ James Russell Lowell
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Subtract things
To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day.
~ Lao Tzu
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Dissonance for the win
The same way having a diversity of traits within a population is optimal (yet uncomfortable) in nature, and having a diversity of personalities/beliefs/backgrounds is optimal (yet uncomfortable) in society, I would argue that possessing a diversity of values, perspectives, and inclinations as an individual is optimal (yet uncomfortable) for our psychology.
~ Mark Manson from, https://markmanson.net/what-is-wisdom
That’s an insightful observation.
In certain circles there are some oft-posed rhetorical questions: What’s the work only you can do? What, if you ceased doing it, would people miss? …because there’s a lot of other stuff you could choose to do. Stuff which is easy, and which can be done by anyone. And then there’s the other stuff: The stuff that requires us to balance competing priorities, to resolve conflicting requirements, and to choose among exclusive options.
When’s the last time you made a sub-optimal decision knowing that doing so was better than doing nothing?
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Quiet desperation
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
~ Henry David Thoreau
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What to seek
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise, instead, seek what they sought.
~ Matsuo Bashō
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Reflection. Imitation. Experience.
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; And third, by experience, which is bitterest.
~ Confucius
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Distinction
The single most important distinction in life […] is to distinguish between an opportunity to be seized and a temptation to be resisted.
~ Jonathan Sacks
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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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Not fortuitous
If [the gods] had made philosophic knowledge also a common attribute and we were all born wise, then wisdom would have forfeited its principal quality, which is that it is not fortuitous. What is precious and magnificent about it is that it does not merely happen to people but that the individual is himself responsible for it and cannot obtain it from others.
~ Seneca, from letter on Philosophy and Progress
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Be your own prosecutor
You must catch yourself. Some people boast of their failings; Do you suppose a man who counts his vices as virtues can take thought for remedying them? So far as you can, then, be your own prosecutor, investigate yourself, function first as accuser, then as judge, and only in the end as advocate. And sometimes you must overrule the advocate.
~ Seneca
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Uneasy pleasures
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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