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.
- The problem with throwing the tomato is it precludes using it for anything else.
- When someone says something you don’t understand, ask them to specify or quantify.
- Who’s down to clown?
- Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.
- Respect for the truth is the basis for all morality.
- Relying on only one sense weakens the others.
- Subtlety and self-control are power.
- Train yourself to lean toward the positive under stress.
- The difference between a people and a mob is some act as individuals.
- When people question your motives for saying something, they’re implicitly conceding it’s true.—Paul Graham
- Good pay today doesn’t guarantee good pay tomorrow.
- We tithe just by living. We breathe the situation, eat the problems, and shit the solutions. That’s life.
- Don’t prioritize a counterfactual over the actual.
- A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.—Rabindranath Tagore
- Naval’s Razors: 1) If you have two choices to make and it’s 50/50, take the path that’s more painful in the short term, 2) If a task is worth less than your ambitious hourly rate – outsource it, automate it, or delete it.
- Save yourself, then help those you trust.
- Don’t take pay in status.
- Outcomes are easier to manage than behaviors.
- Leadership is acknowledged by the led.
- We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.—Seneca
- Mind your own business.
- Eliminate junk, whether food, thoughts, energy or people.
- Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.—John Updike
- Change happens when discipline, emotional maturity and taking responsibility for our lives intersect.
- In a post-scarcity environment, taste is the only differentiator.
- I don’t believe in words. In general, people lie, they don’t tell the truth. The truth lies in what’s hidden, in what’s not told. Reality lies in the unspoken part of our lives.—Nuri Bilge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
- Many things are beyond our control, but our work is our own and should be as good as we can make it.
- Attend to difficult conversations first.
- Table stakes and playing the game well are not the same.
- We do not lack communication, on the contrary we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 108
- Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.—Leo Tolstoy
- Begin by being open, flexible and kind.
- Live your life as an experiment.
- It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.—Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
- Don’t let life harden your heart.
- How do you relate to discomfort?
- Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is it healed.
- Every moment, a transition.
- Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.—Imam Ali
- Testimony is evidence.
- People by and large become what they think of themselves.—William James
- Love is consideration, where decisions are made with the preferences of others in mind.
- Speaking is limited in time and reach. Writing persists.
- Ideas are dreams.
- Place your fearful mind in the cradle of love.
- Intelligence has little to do with happiness or good relationships with others.
- In this life we cannot do great things, we can only do small things with great love.—Mother Theresa
- Are you living with the spirit of forgiveness, centered in your heart or from the spirit of judgment?
- All of us are merely passing through.
- The silence of the unsaid is always working surreptitiously with another silence, which is that of the unsayable.—John Berger (from his preface to I Could Read the Sky by Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke)
- To heal the body, we must study pain.
- The imperfect has greater need of love.
- People with opinions just go around bothering each other.
- The mind creates the abyss, and the heart crosses it.
- A cup of understanding, a barrel of love and an ocean of patience.
- Spiritual progress is turning one insult after another into fuel for development.
- Life is just a succession of errors.
- Success comes after failure.
- More choice means more opportunity for error.
- Repel the mediocre.
- Words are where most change begins.—Brandon Sanderson
- I don’t know. I’m the X, where X is someone of no consequence.
- If you go, you have to stay gone.
- Don’t slip on the banana peel of nihilism, even while listening to the roar of Nothingness. ―Lawrence Ferlinghetti
- A pickpocket only sees the saint’s pockets.
- Peace comes not from fulfilling our wants but ending dissatisfaction.
- Want what you have and don’t want what you don’t have.
- Anger shows us the degree of our limits and attachments.
- Learning requires giving up our stories.
- Judgment is often prerecorded dramas we play to avoid the unexpected variations of this moment.
- The judging mind can only be met with the forgiving heart.
- Clarity without judgment; justice without hatred.
- A cult is a religion with no political power. ―Tom Wolfe
- Try your dumbest idea.
- Correctness is determined by frame.
- A corrupt process deserves to be hacked.
- Many in this world recognise nothing as good unless it also brings some profit. They regard their friends much as they do their cattle, ranked according to who promises the largest gain. —Cicero, On Friendship, 79.
- The bombs we plant in each other are ticking away.—Edward Yang
- A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.—Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.—Samuel Johnson
- Not all skills are trade skills.
- Big people don’t deliver bad news.
- Life is not lived in a glass case.
- Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.
- Every civilization is built on ponzi growth.
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