Zuihitsu, 2024-11

~ cafebedouin

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.

  • After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.—Italian proverb
  • Planning assumes order. Preparation assumes a range of possibilities.
  • Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.—Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The people that wound us are not interested in how the blood gets cleaned up.
  • Hear what is not being said.
  • Disagree, then commit.
  • X should be X. If you want Y, use that instead.
  • Either purpose or pleasure.
  • A mistake made twice is a lesson not learnt.—Anonymous
  • The three big decisions: what to do, where to live, and who to spend time with.
  • Evaluating relations: 1) how much effort are we willing to make? 2) for how long?
  • Two rules: 1) never give out all the information.
  • We have poetry / so we do not die of history.—Meena Alexander
  • If you wait by a river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.—Sun Tzu
  • If your life is on the line, make sure you have more than a theory.
  • Wait for the thing that will burn the unburnt side of your soul.
  • Either learn to be satisfied with little or you’ll be satisfied with nothing.
  • There is no love without commitment.
  • The wolf doesn’t care about the sheep’s opinion, and the shepherd need not concern himself with the wolf’s.
  • If there’s something you like, and you combine it with something else that you like, chances are that you’re going to like the result.—Claudia Fleming
  • The most tragic form of loss isn’t the loss of security; it’s the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different.—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
  • Sanity is a handicap and liability if you’re living in a mad world.—Anthony Burgess
  • Craftsmanship is knowing how and art is knowing when to stop.
  • What we don’t appreciate, we soon lose.
  • When it is illegal, the cops come.
  • One thing the middle class cannot afford is candor.—paraphrased James Baldwin
  • When a clown moves into a palace he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.—Turkish proverb
  • Love does not consider the consequences.
  • If you lie about the facts, you’ll lie about everything.