. . . Separation between God or reality and yourself is brought about by you, by the mind that clings to the known, to certainty, to security. This separation cannot be bridged over, there is no ritual, no discipline, no sacrifice that can carry you across it; there is no savior, no Master, no guru who can lead you to the real or destroy the separation. The division is not between the real and yourself; it is in yourself.
-J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life
........................Frustration is bargaining with reality, hoping it will change.
The trouble with fiction . . . is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.
Franklin's humanity was based on no illusions about life—on no sappy opinions about the natural goodness of human beings, on no false hopes for the future. Rather, it was based on seeing the world as it really is, and not as we want it to be. Moreover, his deep skepticism was, in his view, the only means by which he or any other human being could be free of pride, envy, anger, and indignation, which distort the soul, separate us from others, and give rise to folly and human wickedness.
-Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought
To know the most important things was, for Franklin, to answer two questions (to borrow an expression from John William Ward). Who am I? And how did I get to be me? . . . in his mind the most important truths could be understood only by investigating our most immediate and concrete experiences of life—life as real people live it and not as we might see it through the dark glass of intellectual sophistication.
-Jerry Weinberger, Benjamin Franklin Unmasked: On the Unity of His Moral, Religious, and Political Thought
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real. It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.
Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence. But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality. In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science—the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance. We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems.
-Michael Crichton, as cut-and-pasted from here
............................with Morgan Housel:
Evolution is ruthless and unforgiving—it doesn't just teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn't.
Success has its own gravity. . . .being right instills confidence that you can't be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back.
Every industry and career is different, but there's universal value in accepting hassle when reality demands it.
the truth is, everything comes with overhead. That's reality. Everything comes with pieces you don't like.
The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the greatest contributors to success.
Not maximizing your potential is actually the sweet spot in the world where perfecting one skill compromises another.
The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.
The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is to be able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long term growth.
A pretty good lesson from history is that the long run is usually pretty good and the short run is usually pretty bad. It takes effort to reconcile those two and learn how to manage them with what seem like conflicting skills. Those who can't usually end up either bitter pessimists or bankrupt optimists.
-all are excerpts taken from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
Your mind creates a world, with beauty and ugliness, excitement, tedium, friends, and enemies, and you live within that construction. People don't see the world with their eyes, they see it with their entire life.
Cognitive scientists call this view of the human person "constructionism." Constructionism is the recognition, backed up by the last half century of brain research, that people don't passively take in reality. Each person actively constructs their own perception of reality. That's not to say there is not an objective reality out there. It's to say that we have only subjective access to it.
-David Brooks, How To Know A Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. The seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous "self-esteem" that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.
-Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
........................................great quotes.
Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 6
A lot of times we’re not interested in truth – we’re interested in the elimination of uncertainty, and that fact alone causes us to believe things that have little relation to reality.
-Morgan Housel, from this post
It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of human beings, however, that they can distinguish an idea from the reality represented in it, can entertain propositions from which they withhold their assent, and can move judge-like in the realm of ideas, calling each before the bar of rational argument, accepting them and rejecting them regardless of the reproductive cost.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
Once one realizes the reality of reality’s vast and incomprehensible-in-its-concrete-details complexity, one is naturally humble about what one can do to ‘change’ reality. Schemes for using the coercive powers of government to achieve economic and social betterment are then naturally viewed with enormous skepticism. How do you know? How will you acquire the knowledge you must acquire if your scheme is to work as promised? Such questions are instinctively asked by the wise and stubbornly ignored by the schemers.
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
In dealing with the world, Washington was an utter realist. He always sought, as he put it in 1775, at the outset of the war against Britain, to "make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish." . . .
If any single person was responsible for establishing the young Republic on a firm footing, it was Washington. He was nearly as much of an aristocrat as the United States ever produced, in his acceptance of social hierarchy and in his belief that some were born to command and most to obey. Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest."
- Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different
........................................with Morgan Housel:
The line between "inspiringly bold" and "foolishly reckless" can be a millimeter thick and only visible with hindsight.
We have brains that prefer easy answers without much appetite for nuance.
. . . financial success is not a hard science. It's a soft skill where how you behave is more important than what you know.
There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.
A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone's reality.
Napoleon's definition of a military genius was, "The man who can do the average thing when all those around him are going crazy."
-all snippets from his book, The Psychology of Money
The administrative state may operate in a bubble where blatantly bad ideas receive little or no substantial pushback. State officials seem disconnected from reality when they issue arbitrary orders that are unlikely to make a difference when applied in the real world.
-Michael Van Beek, as culled from here
Posts
All Comments
