You are only young once. After that you have to think up some other excuse.
~ Billy Arthur
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Wisdom
Too late
When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.
~ Alexander Pope
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Wisdom
Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.
~ Bill Nye
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Clear and simple
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Perspective
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.
~ Miyamoto Musashi
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Intelligence
The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how to behave when we don’t know what to do.
~ John Holt
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Common sense
But I am still optimist enough to credit life with invincibility, I am still ready to bet that the non-human otherness at the root of man’s being will ultimately triumph over the all too human selves who frame the ideologies and engineer the collective suicides. For our survival, if we do survive, we shall be less beholden to our common sense […] that to our caterpillar- and cicadea-sense, to intelligence, in other words, as it operates on the organic level.
~ Aldous Huxley
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Irrelevant in all circumstances
I waffled on my title. I started a draft with the current title, which is simply item #7 plucked from Housel’s post. Later, I misread it as “Irreverant…” and, even after noticing my speling error, still thought myself clever; “Haha, yes, I am irreverant in all circumstances.” Which my mind then toggled back to “irrelevant” and, “Yes, I am probably also irrelevant in all circumstances.” Ouch.
The firehose makes it easy to mirror the poor Oxford boy: since information is free and ubiquitous but adding context has a mental price, the path of least resistance is to know facts without a clue where they go or whether they’re useful.
~ Morgan Housel from, https://collabfund.com/blog/different-kinds-of-information/
And no, it’s not at all a diss on [a]social media. It’s a terrific little post listing different kinds of information. I’d love to be a source of a large amount of #2 and #4. But if I’m being honest, I’m more a source of #5. …and #7, I definitely generate a lot of that. Maybe even some of #8—but only in the, “oh my gawd, no! Spit that out!” sort of way.
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To see beauty
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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Miracles
A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.
~ M. C. Escher
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Wisdom and learning
Seek to learn constantly while you live; Do not wait in the faith that old age by itself will bring wisdom.
~ Solon
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Clever
If you want to be a clever person, you have to learn how to ask cleverly, how to listen attentively, how to respond quietly, and how to stop talking when there is nothing more to say.
~ Leo Tolstoy
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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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