Technically, zuihitsu are longer reflections than what I tend to collect. But, the general idea is right. Here’s this month’s installment. If you want the complete set, please download the fortune file.

• There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done.
• Is there anything actually bad about this? If not, move forward.
• Friday is not for new problems.
• Failure is always overdetermined. There are millions of ways to fail.
• Two types of opponent: those whose survival hinges on the outcome and everyone else.
• If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments.
• Wealth is a tool of freedom. The pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
• A cliché is anything you’ve ever heard before.
• One of the most important skills is to know is who to listen to on what subject.
• What is real and pretend, can be the same thing at a different time.
• Whose imagination is at work here?
• I don’t know what you are expecting, but this is what is here for you right now.
• Language is a virus.
• Use symbols and speak indirectly.
• The ideal meeting, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.
• Reread. Books wait for you, and they blossom in the time between readings.
• Everyone is an actor. What part do they play? Are they well cast and capable?
• We are created to be destroyed.
• You don’t have to know about, understand, or even agree with a risk for it to still be a risk.
• Friendships take work. Ask, ask, then ask again. Don’t take anything personally.
• The smaller the rod the faster the swing.
• The man without emotions is the one to fear.
• The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery.
• Stay away from the machinery of the modern world. It will ruin your imagination.—William Gass
• When love beckons, follow.
• Work is love made visible.
• Comfort enters your house as a guest, only to become host and master.
• Face the sunlight.
• No one can command the skylark not to sing.
• What rules the world is heart, not the mind.
• Real boats rock.
• Power attracts pathological personalities.—Frank Herbert
• Most decisions are reversible.
• Everything sacred gives with one hand and takes with the other.
• The religious will call truth heresy.
• Reason is the first victim of strong emotion.
• Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.
• Peace requires room to maneuver.
• Nothing indicates an empty life more than empty words.
• Truth suffers from too much analysis.
• Actions over words.
• In the churn, expect all relationships to change.
• Security can be obtained from mobility as well as from fortifications.
• Are you looking at the fire plumes and majesty of rockets or their cargo?
• An offer is only as good as the real thing it buys.
• Nobody has a you-shaped hole in their heart.
• There are as many types of sight as there are types of blindness.
• Joining an incompatible group creates weakness.
• You cannot stop a mental pandemic anymore than you can stop any other disease.
• Imagination and initiative are the purview of moral actors.
• Who can see beyond the narrow destiny of their prejudices?
• Everyone is an interloper.
• More structure selects for a low agency bottom and a sociopathic top.
• Get right with yourself. Get right with the world.
• Blame conveys power. Only the person responsible can be blamed.
• Change always has a component of grief.
• Confidence is having room to fail.
• Success is a random walk finding an unknown. It is not finding a needle in a haystack.
• If someone is cruel to their outgroup, they are not a good person.
• Explaining poetry is like trying to explain a perfume. —Alejandra Pizarnik
• I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen. —John Steinbeck
• Realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
• Most conversations don’t mean anything beyond, “I like you enough to talk to you.”
• Beware the helplessness gambit of the chronic victim.—Sheldon Kopp
• You cannot stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
• Difficulties exist to thicken the plot.
• Modern schools teach punishment.
• Humans are omnivorous opportunists, easily domesticated but prone to wander.
• Save me, save me from tomorrow / I don’t want to sail with this ship of fools.—Karl Wallinger
• Everyone has a different limit for weird shit.
• Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.—Rudolf Spielmann
• An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.—Arthur Miller
• The better you are, the more you want informed feedback.
• Be a fun fountain, not a fun sponge.
• You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
• One trains to live. One does not live to train.
• The more we know, the more difficult it can be to decide.
• Study the survivors and learn from them.
• When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the body cries betrayal.
• The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
• Most errors arise from obsolete assumptions.
• Take the rough with the smooth.
• Advice is a dangerous gift.
• A leader controls and limits their reactions to what is expected.
• There is no good government without good people running it.
• Distrust anything claiming to be pure logic.
• Nothing is more distorted than when the only thing we see is our own reflection.
• Mind slavery is practicing technique without values.
• Fortune passes everywhere.
• Uncertainty over certainty.
• Tend to the wolves within your fences. Those outside may not exist!
• Words can only be used to decieve.
• History has its own court and renders its own judgments.
• Knowing is a barrier to learning.
• What is the hidden argument behind the word?
• Hardware is useless without software.
• Study something from a distance and you know its principles.
• Indifference destroys many things.
• New knowledge comes from the uncertain.
• Life is not a problem to solve, but a reality to be experienced.
• Avoid being a seeker of quick profit.
• Greed is a padded yoke.
• See the utopia in the dystopia, and vice versa.
• Creativity is created from inconvenience.
• The police and military minds are alike.
• Failure is its own demonstration.
• Is intelligence the ability to play with abstractions?
• Listening is where love begins.
• A marketplace soul sees only souks, everywhere.
• Hypocrisy requires witch hunts and scapegoats.
• Membership in a group frees people from personal responsibility.
• Conservatives idolize the past. Liberals idolize themselves.
• The secret of community is suppressing the incompatible.
• Machines condition their users to interact with everything like a machine.
• A harness is not complete control.
• Specialists have both uses and limitations.
• Cooperation is the sign of the healer.
• If it flys, floats or fucks, rent it.
• For agency, the most important bit is to know when things have gone wrong.
• Anything and anyone can fail, but brave, good friends help.
• The land of your birth shapes who you become.
• Do not make the mistake of judging others by your own lights.
• People who know they are right cannot be reasoned with.
• Love needs no guarantees.
• Evidence still requires judgment.
• Nature makes no leaps.
• When consequences are lost or concealed, lessons are lost.
• Systems absorb the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen resistance to change.
• Argument is violence.
• Desire brings people together. Data limits dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.
• Dependency fosters weakness.
• Never be in company you would not want to die with.
• Allow for differences that come from good will.
• The empty places are always worthy of study.
• History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe.
• Square thoughts resist circles.
• Every temptation, a lesson.
• If you love in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth.
• Only fools prefer the past.
• Discipline is often to limit, not liberate.
• To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.—Anatole France
• Measuring it doesn’t make it valid.
• You get what you get and don’t get upset.
• Madness is an exception in individuals but the rule in groups.—Nietzsche
• Some advantages last longer than others but all are temporary.
• A preference for predictability selects against variability.
• Curiosity unsatisfied fills the empty space with imaginings.
• Choose peace over people.
• Pay attention to the product, not just the brochure.
• Law is decided based on enforcement. Legal or other considerations are secondary to clout.
• The mind of the believer stagnates, no need to grow outward.
• Support strength, not weakness.
• Violence imposes its own limits.
• The powerful want a safe line of inquiry that allow them to capture most of the benefits of new ideas and products.
• Rot at the core will spread.
• Wealth is both boon and bane.
• Resisting change is like shouting into the wind.
• Let us not rail about justice so long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.
• Someone has to plow it first.
• We become what we do.
• Desire for power drives corruption.
• Victory is sometimes achieved only by paying a moral price.
• Kick the truth and shatter it!
• The First Amendment doesn’t come with a heating pad.
• Bureaucracy elevates conformity.
• Silence is often the best thing to say.
• Trying to avoid complications often creates them.
• Common cause for a common problem.
• The oppressed will have their day and heaven help the oppressor when that day comes.
• The more people, the more preconceptions.
• Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
• The slave makes an awful master.
• Every life has its price.
• Manuals create habits.
• The past must be reinterpreted by the present.
• Moral decisions require abandoning our self-interest.
• Do no violence to curiosity.
• Unknowns carry their own mystique.
• Tragedy is what happens to me; comedy is what happens to you.— Mel Brooks
• The self you construct will haunt you, seek to possess you as if it were you.
• The hunchback cannot see their own hunch.
• Necessity opens doors.
• Even addicts dream of freedom.
• Tourism is the freedom to go see what has become banal.
• Be resilient. Be strong. Be ready for change.
• The gift given with no reservation is the greatest gift of all.
• Creation always involves elements outside oneself.
• The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late. Of course, the young man will never understand this truth.—Norm Macdonald in Based on a True Story