quotations

Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

"When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight."

Chinua Achebe

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
I

Adam Smith explained: We conceive … a sort of gratitude for those inanimated objects, which have been the causes of great, or frequent pleasure to us. The sailor, who, as soon as he got ashore, should mend his fire with the plank upon which he had just escaped from a shipwreck, would seem to be guilty of an unnatural action. We should expect that

Brian Eno, who wrote that at one point he “decided to turn ‘pretentious’ into a compliment”: “The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you

"A child does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods ... the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted." C.S. Lewis.

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
Marilynne Robinson -- Gilead

Pity for oneself as a child feels more pardonable than pity for the current model, and is almost as satisfying.
Michael Chabon - Libertine

“If all you did was just looked for things to appreciate, you would live a joyously spectacular life.” ― Esther Abraham Hicks