A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Consequences aren't optional. It's in the nature of being finite that every choice comes with some sort of consequences, because at any instant, you can only pick one path, and must deal with the repercussions of not picking any of the others.
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts
The world has need of a philosophy, or a religion, which will promote life. But in order to promote life it is necessary to value something other than mere life. Life devoted only to life is animal, without any real human value, incapable of preserving men permanently from weariness and the feeling that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it must serve some end which seems, in some sense, outside human life, some end which is impersonal and above mankind, such as God or truth or beauty.
-Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction, 1916
26. A man's true delight is to do the things he was made for. He was made to show goodwill to his kind, to rise about the promptings of his senses, to distinguish appearances from realities, and to pursue the study of universal Nature and her works.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: Book Eight
The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard. There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still in them.
The way to live is to create. Die empty. Get every idea out of your head and into reality.
-Derek Sivers, How To Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion
................................................Julian
Someone says life is hard.
The comedian says, "Compared to what?"
Comedians are philosophers.
"These steps are not prescriptive, they are descriptive. All of it, relapses included, are just how people change. The process becomes less painful when we honor the honesty of it, when we honor the truth that nonlinear progress is still progress." . . .
"So what does honoring this process mean, then?" . . .
"It means that we don't expect to be perfect. It means when we miss a goal and slip backward, we smile and acknowledge that it isn't a tragedy, that it is the process working as we expected. When we give ourselves that honest, essential generosity, it isn't so painful to try for that next step, because missing isn't a refutation of what we have accomplished or who we are. It is just another experiment. More data." . . .
There is no central wisdom that turns messy human endeavor into easy, linear efficiency.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You
Imagine your future self judging your current life choices. When making a decision, ask yourself how you'll feel about it when you are old. What would your future self and family thank you for? Simple actions now will compound to give them a better life.
People think we live in a world of politics, society, norms, and news. But none of it is real. They're just interpersonal drama. They're the noisy waste product of unhealthy minds.
George Washington’s favorite saying was “many mickles make a muckle.” It was an old Scottish proverb that illustrates a truth we all know: things add up. Even little ones. Even at the pace of one per day. Because, as the Stoics would say, it’s the little things that add up to wisdom and to virtue. What you read, who you study under, what you prioritize. Day to day, practiced over a lifetime, this is what creates greatness. This is what leads to a good life.
-Ryan Holiday, from here
It is yourself as perceiver of the world, not the world, that you should be attempting to change.
-John Moriarty, Dreamtime
Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You
Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.
-Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
. . . man's main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain but rather to see a meaning in his life.
In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. . . .
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
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