Why You Should Tilt at Windmills (and Other Quixotic Reflections) (excerpt)
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Why You Should Tilt at Windmills (and Other Quixotic Reflections) (excerpt)
Putting the idealism and pragmatism together is forever uncomfortable. Frequently the direction set by ideals means not taking the clearest practical path. More subtly, often as you go to put principles into practice, you realize that the ideal is not quite as simple as you thought when you started.
Sari Azout • Figuring it out, again and again
And I start to wonder how I’m able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people, exactly like them, in true conformity to their shoddy illusion. Like flashes from a distant lighthouse, I see all the solutions offered by the imagination’s female side: flight, suicide, renunciation, grandiose acts of our aristocratic
... See moreFernando Pessoa • The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Modern Classics)
to attempt it in the art of life is not only anarchy but inaction.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
To try to do two nearly impossible things at once - understand ourselves as limited by circumstances and yet continue to pursue our projects as if we are truly in control.
the zany is more likely to convert triumph into failure than failure into triumph. Think the coyote’s endless labor of trying to catch the roadrunner.
McKenzie Wark • Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century
It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control.
Rebecca Solnit • A Field Guide to Getting Lost
movements driven by imaginations as supple as art rather than as stiff as dogma.