These aren’t polished essays or tidy aphorisms. They’re scraps I’ve carried around this month—half-heard thoughts, borrowed lines, sudden recognitions—that refused to be forgotten. Zuihitsu literally means “following the brush,” and while my version is shorter and scrappier than the classical form, the impulse feels the same: to catch what drifts across the mind before it dissolves.
They’re not meant to be a system or a manifesto, just a trail of mental breadcrumbs. If any resonate, keep them. If none do, that’s fine too—next month’s batch will be different. For the full, ever-growing collection, grab the the fortune file.
- What is obvious to you is often not obvious to another.
- You don’t have to answer every email or telegraph what you are going to do.
- The people who won’t argue and the people who can’t stop are both necessary. One marks the edge, the other finds out what’s past it.
- Somebody has to hold the door open long enough for the conversation to get interesting.
- Reading the Bible, or any scripture as journalism, is a category error.
- Stability breeds stagnation.
- I’m communist with my family, socialist with my friends, liberal with my country, and capitalist with the rest of the world.
- B=MAP, for any behavior (B) to occur, three variables must converge at the same moment: 1) Motivation (M): Your desire to do the behavior, 2) Ability (A): Your capacity to do the behavior (how easy it is) and 3) Prompt (P): The cue that says “do it now.”
- Dimensions are physical, but scale is mental.—Massimo Vignelli
- Are you thinking about the effort or the payoff?
- Never say, that’s not my job.
- A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
- A moral claim based on other’s needs is not a moral claim.
- Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power.
- People are quick to judge, slow to support.
- Complexity is often a mask for a lack of understanding.
- Movements don’t sit between poles—they emerge from many axes pulling at once. The movement is the coordination space where those competing tensions meet, wrestle, and take shape.
- Self-sabotage often starts as self-protection.
- Confidence doesn’t come from believing in yourself. It comes from having done the uncomfortable thing enough times that your nervous system stops flagging it as an emergency.
- Friendship: proximity, time (casual ~70 hours, close ~200 hours) and timeline (similar lifestage), and energy (rowing in the same direction)
- Six seconds is a complete sentence in the grammar of video.
- Once something has a name online, it is effectively over. You need a name to move from event to transmission.
- Short form video is the kindling you burn between larger logs of content.
- Ideology isn’t the cure, it’s just the flavor of the anesthesia.
- Individualism is a luxury of stability. Family-first collectivism is the inheritance of centuries of collapse.
- No interest, no involvement. Mentally unstable means you are unable. If it doesn’t smell sweet, reel in the meat.
- “…those who wrap themselves in America are naked.”—Hosni Mubarak
- When things go pear-shaped, strange stuff happens.
- It’ll quilt out, i.e., If there was a small mistake in a quilt project, once the final stitches were in and the project was washed, no one would ever see the problem.
- All people bring joy: some by coming, some by going!
- Eat less, taste more.
- Knock with your elbows.
- Tout passe et tout s’efface, sauf les souvenirs. Or, everything passes and everything fades away, except memories.
- Don’t push the river.
- Sing out, Louise! from the musical Gypsy! Make a choice, be specific and carpe diem.
- Always make new mistakes!
- Don’t waste reality in chase of a dream.
- I never promised you a rose garden.
- We don’t hate peas. We hate Hitler.
- The day starts the night before.
- Christmas doesn’t just happen!
- There is no fail. You either succeed or you learn.
- You can’t eat prestige.
- Always be kinder than you feel.
- If ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.
- If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts, we’d all have a Merry Christmas.
- The world is full of lifters and leaners. Make sure you’re a lifter and stay away from the leaners!
- That’s the ditch you dug; hope you like the view from the bottom.
- Don’t borrow trouble—steal it at gunpoint, throw it in the trunk, and drive it across state lines. Problems are best gotten rid of before they have the chance to breed and multiply.
- Don’t put your crazy on the front porch. Keep it in the basement dungeon in the gimp chest.
- Life’s uncertain. Eat dessert first.
- We all spend it differently.
- Double the liquor and dim the lights.
- Time wounds all heels.
- A list is never just a list. It is an argument: This is what is good, what matters. Cue the debate.—Ligaya Mishan
- Don’t move to a mental slum.—Susan Sontag
- I wish you love. Courage. And fantasy.—Susan Sontag
- Visibility is not the same as wisdom.— retired Australian general Mick Ryan
- …a fact is a wire through which one sends a current.—Saul Bellow
- It is a particular vanity of the perceptive: the belief that noticing one’s own pretense dissolves it. It does not dissolve it. It repaints it in more interesting colors.
- Look for strong confusion.
- The bottleneck is in review, not the writing.
- Declaration is a gate, not a metric.
- The view from nowhere is never late; it carries no freight.
- To get X, give X.
- Principle without a binding mechanism is occupiable by whoever benefits from occupying it.
- Constraints don’t need reasons. They are expressions of power.
- Regulation cannot fully substitute for market discipline.
- All money ain’t good money.
- Any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.—Wisława Szymborska
- Anxiety feeds on importance.
- You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.—Marcus Aurelius
- When you’re in a group of people, if it’s not essential to the progression of the conversation, don’t look it up.
- Taking with someone is a performance, and you have to know the audience.
- Every relation starts with bonding, real or artificial, is where the conversation starts.
- There is no center to a human beings.
- Childhood is the credit balance of the writer.
- I may believe in God, but he surely believes in me.
- The power of enforced forgetting is extraordinary.
- People invent the enemies they need.
- The in most room is bare.
- The world runs on fantasy.
- The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.—H. L. Mencken
- If they are going to dislike your work, don’t give them something they can politely dismiss. Give then something so fully committed they have to respect it.
- Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.—Thomas Mann
- What are you letting go of? And what are you holding on for?
- Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die.—Mel Brooks
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