Looking good

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed
in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

            T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

Believe it

Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.
Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are.
Spend enough time pretending something is true
and you might as well believe it.

        Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life

 

 

What is all this?

The basic drive behind real philosophy is curiosity about the world, not interest in the writings of philosophers. Each of us emerges from the preconsciousness of babyhood and simply finds himself here, in it, in the world. That experience alone astonishes some people. What is all this — what is the world? And what are we?

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher

 

 

 

 

Right and wrong

If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong,
we could never get anything useful done.
We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives,
and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones.

            Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail

 

 

 

 

Look no further

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

            John Barth, The End of the Road

 

 

 

 

 

Tend to your corner

I've had to learn, time and again,
that faithfulness isn’t always about taking big leaps,
but also walking with small steps,
and that it’s possible to make a lasting difference in the world
by tending to one small corner of it.

        Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave

 

 

 

 

Poem: Dawn

5am: the frogs
ask what is it, what is it?
It is what it is.

         Campbell McGrath

 

 

 

 

 

Power

Power, used well, should be empowering, contagious, and creative.
It should be collaborative, enabling, and protective.
It should be self-critical, curious, and brave.
It should know its own limits and be prepared to risk its own reputation.
This kind of power asks questions to which it does not know the answers
and listens because in listening is learning, and in learning is life.

        Padraig O'Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World 

 

 

 

 

 

Take it as you find it

When I eat my dinner I don’t do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I enjoy it.
The world’s full of amusing things—books, wine, travel, friends—everything.
I’ve never seen any meaning in it all, and I don’t want to see one.
Why not take life as you find it?

                George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exceptional

Carlyle remarked: “The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.”
Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark.

Bertrand Russell, How to Become a Man of Genius

 

 

 

 

 

Walk on the west side

The Upper West Side is the part of Manhattan I like best;
it has the excitement and pace of the city,
but with the feel of a real neighborhood.
Just by walking on the street you know that real life is being lived there.

        David Rosenfelt, New Tricks

 

 

 

 

Tomato harvest

The tomato hides its griefs.
    Internal damage is hard to spot.

                Julia Child, Julia Child & Company

 

 

 

 

 

Light and shadow

Any religion is a shadow of God.
But the shadows of God are not God.

        Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Women Who Dye Their Hair

Some of us have done it since our twenties
when our hair turned white on the death of a loved one
or it ran in the family like baldness, and some of us
spray red or purple on shaved stubble,
and others have let it creep up on us,
counting the odd hair, then the fifth, the fiftieth,
till our teenagers point out how old we’re getting
but our lovers who hate anything artificial
like make-up and sequins, though they accept
icecream and the Pill, say we shouldn’t bother,
so we steal home from Boots with the ColorGlo
and lock ourselves in the bathroom in rubber gloves,
emerge an hour later ten years younger
with a smart grey streak over one temple
and mahogany smudges round the jaw line.
And when the roots start to show we carelessly
pop into the hairdresser and book a colour
which means a cut and finish and takes all morning
so we can catch up on our reading, extending
our knowledge of the stars and multiple orgasm,
but we have to go every six weeks or it starts to fade
and by now the local firm is turning our hair to hay
so we find a better one at fifty quid a splash,
a rollercoaster we can’t get off of,
and we decide to let it all grow out and be our age
which isn’t a hundred and five but might as well be.

                                Janet Fisher

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fair warning

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
If we’ve been bamboozled long enough,
we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us.
It’s simply too painful to acknowledge,
even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.
Once you give a charlatan power over you,
you almost never get it back.

             Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

 

 

 

 

Lost in translation

Do not imagine that art is something which is designed
to give gentle uplift and self-confidence.
Art is not a brassiere. At least, not in the English sense.
But do not forget that brassiere is the French word for life-jacket.

            Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

A good bet

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

        Franz Kafka The Zürau Aphorisms 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Think twice

Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas
are not only ill prepared for making discoveries;
they also make very poor observations.

        Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

 

 

 

 

 

Honor where honor is due

May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta,
        the nap and the pause in all its forms.

                        Alice Walker, The Cushion in the Road

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source error

Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian
any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.

        William Ashley "Billy" Sunday, Billy Sunday, The Man and his Message

 

 

 

 

Poem: The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer

Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit

so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season.

Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs 

of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail

all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red

 

from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket

and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness

in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees

were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out

the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones

 

(a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention

my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty

around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, 

nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing

the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. 

 

I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said

Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand

to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made

a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been

full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.
 

                                Aimee Nezhukumatathil