Justin Lancy

if you want to be a good thinker, you must develop a mind that can jump the jurisdictional boundaries.

Franz Kafka wrote, “It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you.”

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

André Gide put it, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

empire is primarily a money-making concern.

A story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this

Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Too often the rules we fear to break are the ones that forbid us from taking care of ourselves at the expense of someone else’s inconvenience or hurt feelings.