Zuihitsu, 2022-08

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.

1. Something doesn’t have to last forever for it to be successful.
2. Perfect happiness is the privilege of deciding when things end.—Sarah Manguso
3. If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens.—Michael A. Singer
4. The simpler the message, the sharper the razor.
5. Figure out the what before the how.
6. There is no problem without a solution. If there is no solution, it’s just something you need to live with.
7. Don’t let your intellectual horizons narrow to fit your politics.
8. History is shaped by the tools we use to disseminate ideas, not the ideas themselves.
9. More time invested in choosing leads to better choices but also less satisfaction with them.
10. Don’t apologize for being unavailable.
11. Celebrity endorsements in new technologies happen at peaks.
12. The ego is not master in its own house.—Sigmund Freud
13. Life is full of alternatives but no choice.—Patrick White
14. Reality is what is seen, counted, and quantified.—Jacques Ellul
15. Aggregating demand is key to success.
16. Who’s in charge?—YOU ARE
17. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.—Albert Einstein
18. Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.—Benny Hill
19. Tinkerbell Effect describes things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them.
20. Trading and prediction are not the same thing.
21. Live with your choices and learn.
22. If you lead with fear, you will find something to fear.
23. Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe.—Karl Schwarzschild
24. Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.—Honore de Balzac
25. All subcultures are, in a sense, status Ponzi schemes.—Scott Alexander
26. A society grows great when old [people] plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.
27. Self report is bullshit.
28. It is not certain that everything is uncertain.—Blaise Pascal
29. When the time is ripe for certain things, they appear at different places, in the manner of violets coming to light in the early spring.-Father of Jànos Bolyai, who discovered non-Euclidean geometry.
30. You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.-Katharine White Horn
31. Do whatever brings you life, then. Follow your own fascinations,  obsessions, and compulsions. Trust them. Create whatever creates revolution in the heart.
32. It ain’t what they call you it’s what you answer to.-W.C. Fields
33. What is beyond our grasp is neither the future nor the past, but the present itself.
34. There aren’t any bad crowds, just wrong choices.
35. Harbor the wolf, and you may find your sheep missing.
36. Don’t tinkle on my twinkle.
37. The real mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, it is a reality to be experienced. —A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe by Michael S. Schneider
38. People carry worlds within them.—Neil Gaiman
39. First bite is free.
40. No darkness lasts forever. And even there, there are stars.—Ursula K. Le Guin
41. When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. That’s my religion.—Abraham Lincoln
42. Life is thick sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.—attributed to Voltaire
43. It takes three years of working on something to make good money and seven years to generate wealth.—hosts of The TMBA Podcast
44. Iron sharpens iron.
45. Listening is the heart of learning.
46. Tolerance is a peace treaty, not a suicide pact.
47. Disrespect is earned.
48. The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do.—J.M. Coetzee
49. The apocalypse has arrived, but it is not evenly distributed yet.
50. Your library should contain as much of what you don’t know as you can afford.
51. Denarrate, insulate yourself from the other people’s narratives.
52. Nature is not a temple, but a ruin.
53. Defer decisions, learn along the way and trust in iteration.
54. All good things must begin.—Octavia E. Butler
55. On this topic, who has good taste?
56. It doesn’t rain every day.
57. There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?—George Bernard Shaw
58. Truth builds trust.
59. The decisions you make add up.
60. Recency is dramatically overvalued.
61. Empathize with stupidity, and you are halfway to thinking like an idiot.
62. It is often the small things that determine success or failure.