Zuihitsu, 2025-05

~ 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.

  • The exclusive purpose of human existence is to purify our hearts.— Radhanath Swami
  • Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.—Octavia Butler
  • Bitterness is like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one.
  • The beauty ain’t in the necklace. It’s in the neck.
  • If it doesn’t matter in five years, it doesn’t matter.—Cher
  • Spread positive gossip.
  • Take a mini-vacation.
  • Start a weird ritual.
  • Hang out with younger people.
  • Cherish the everyday.
  • Don’t accept criticism from someone that you wouldn’t accept advice from.
  • Our minds don’t know why we do things. Its job is to create stories to protect us from accusations of norm violations.
  • Don’t read the textbook. Argue with it.
  • Crucibles over comfort.
  • Light is right.
  • Don’t follow me / I secretly do not want to be found / I’m still a beginner / Still on the ground / So I feel free in knowing no one is around
  • Emotions are signals. Anger signals boundary crossing. Anxiety signals too much living in the future.
  • Habits shape your life, not motivation.
  • Your past is a book. Read it. Don’t live in it.
  • Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.—Nietzsche
  • Without revision, there can be no improvement.—Phil Tetlock & Dan Gardner in Superforecasting
  • Passions often engender their opposites.
  • I don’t believe in different brows—high, low, middle. I believe if you write about things with the proper excitement, they’re accessible to everybody.—Elizabeth Pochoda
  • Performance always drops at scale.
  • People don’t abandon the people they love. They abandon the people they’re using.
  • Every augmentation is also an amputation.—Marshall McLuhan
  • Write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration.—Octavia Butler
  • Even programs need compilers.
  • Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.—Rumi
  • Does anyone notice when a fish cries?
  • Life is a picnic on a precipice.—W.H. Auden
  • If you can control yourself, you don’t need to control anyone else.
  • What you cannot see, you can’t control.
  • Many questions are best not asked, nor answered.
  • Resist the human urge to fix it, say it could be worse, or to find the bright side. Then, just listen and ask questions.
  • Escalate the negative as little as possible.
  • Politeness is for people we don’t know or like.
  • What very important truth do few people agree with you on
  • We are never as fortunate or unfortunate as we imagine.—La Rochefoucauld
  • We all have enough strength to bear the troubles of other people.—La Rochefoucauld
  • No disguise can long hide love where it exists, or simulate it where it does not exist.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Silence is the safest policy for someone that doesn’t trust himself.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Everyone complains of his memory; and no one complains of his judgement.—La Rochefoucauld
  • To listen and answer well is the only quality needed to be a great conversationalist.
  • Few people are wise enough to prefer useful criticism to treacherous praise.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Often, those that do not wish to be ruled must rule others.
  • A mind is best employed bearing real misfortune rather than one imagined.
  • A great fault, like a great talent, requires eliminating weaker ones.
  • For many, it is better to be in the vanguard than to be right.
  • Kindness without the capacity to be bad is laziness or lack of agency.
  • Many people disdain possessions, but few know how to give them away.
  • We can forgive the boring, but we cannot forgive those that find us boring.
  • Lovers who never bore of each other are those that can always talk about themselves.
  • We forgive as long as we love.—La Rochefoucauld
  • Say little about your spouse and less about yourself.
  • The treasure is safe only when it is unsought.
  • Fortune and temperament rule the world.
  • The only thing rarer than true love is true friendship.
  • Excellence looks beautiful, but the work to get there is brutal.
  • Training alone helps you get in touch with yourself.
  • Avoid persons and circumstances which make you feel inferior.
  • Small hinges swing big doors.
  • Either learn or earn. Best to do both. If neither, quit.
  • Love is the desire to amplify someone else’s will.
  • Survived too many storms to be bothered by raindrops.—Rumi
  • Obedience is thinking’s opposite.
  • Even the best weapon is an unhappy tool, hateful to living things.
  • The Wadsworth Constant says that you can safely skip the first 30% of anything you see online.
  • Bitterness is like sadness, but stuck eternally at a table for one.
  • Have patience with unresolved questions.
  • What is your reason to live? Are you living or dead?
  • If love doesn’t cost you anything, is it even really love?
  • Competition is not a threat, but an opportunity to grow.
  • People think they need to get better at writing, but nobody thinks they need to get better at thinking. This is why they don’t get better at writing.
    People pleasing is people using.