Quote of the Day

Live with this belief: “I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.” If you saw this fact clearly, you would not be surprised at getting no benefit from the fresh scenes to which you roam each time through weariness of the old scenes. For the first would have pleased you in each case, had you believed it wholly yours. As it is, however, you are not journeying; you are drifting and being driven, only exchanging one place for another, although that which you seek, — to live well, — is found everywhere. 

- Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilious

Quote of the Day

If the headache should come before drunkenness, we should have a care of drinking too much; but pleasure, to deceive us, marches before and conceals her train.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Anger is like flowing water; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you let it flow. Hate is like stagnant water; anger that you denied yourself the freedom to feel, the freedom to flow; water that you gathered in one place and left to forget. Stagnant water becomes dirty, stinky, disease-ridden, poisonous, deadly; that is your hate. On flowing water travels little paper boats; paper boats of forgiveness. Allow yourself to feel anger, allow your waters to flow, along with all the paper boats of forgiveness. Be human.

- C. JoyBell

Quote of the Day

It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

- Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

Quote of the Day

One final point: if Montaigne gives in easily to others, it is not only out of courtesy and to encourage his conversational partners to speak freely to him; it is also because he is not always sure of himself. His opinions are changeable, and he sometimes disagrees with himself. Montaigne loves argument, but he does not need anyone else to provide it. What he detests above all are people who are so arrogant that they take offense when someone else contradicts them. If there is one thing Montaigne loathes, it is smugness, conceit.

- Antoine Compagnon's new book, A Summer with Montaigne: On the Art of Living Well

Quote of the Day

National characteristics are not easy to pin down, and when pinned down they often turn out to be trivialities or seem to have no connexion with one another. Spaniards are cruel to animals, Italians can do nothing without making a deafening noise, the Chinese are addicted to gambling. Obviously such things don’t matter in themselves. Nevertheless, nothing is causeless, and even the fact that Englishmen have bad teeth can tell something about the realities of English life.

- George Orwell - England, Your England

Wisdom Of The Week

Brilliant paper - Evidence of large genetic influences on dog ownership in the Swedish Twin Registry has implications for understanding domestication and health associations.

Abstract:

Dogs were the first domesticated animal and, according to the archaeological evidence, have had a close relationship with humans for at least 15,000 years. Today, dogs are common pets in our society and have been linked to increased well-being and improved health outcomes in their owners. A dog in the family during childhood is associated with ownership in adult life. The underlying factors behind this association could be related to experiences or to genetic influences. We aimed to investigate the heritability of dog ownership in a large twin sample including all twins in the Swedish Twin Registry born between 1926 and 1996 and alive in 2006. Information about dog ownership was available from 2001 to 2016 from national dog registers. The final data set included 85,542 twins from 50,507 twin pairs with known zygosity, where information on both twins were available in 35,035 pairs. Structural equation modeling was performed to estimate additive genetic effects (the heritability), common/shared environmental, and unique/non-shared environmental effects. We found that additive genetic factors largely contributed to dog ownership, with heritability estimated at 57% for females and 51% for males. An effect of shared environmental factors was only observed in early adulthood. In conclusion, we show a strong genetic contribution to dog ownership in adulthood in a large twin study. We see two main implications of this finding: (1) genetic variation may have contributed to our ability to domesticate dogs and other animals and (2) potential pleiotropic effects of genetic variation affecting dog ownership should be considered in studies examining health impacts of dog ownership.

Quote of the Day

The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order – not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.

- Umberto Eco

Quote of the Day

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

We only come to understand ourselves over time and then never fully. He was less interested in drawing conclusions about himself than having a conversation with himself. The dialogue would end only in death.

- Michael Perry, Montaigne in Barn Boots: An Amateur Ambles Through Philosophy

Quote of the Day

There is an intimate connection between our moral life and our intellectual life. Sometimes I think the history of our times can be described as an argument about whether or not this connection is true.

- James V. Schall, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning

Quote of the Day

I am afraid that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, and that we have more curiosity than understanding. We grasp at everything, but catch nothing except wind.

- Michel de Montaigne

Quote of the Day

Every habit and faculty is maintained and increased by the corresponding actions: the habit of walking by walking, the habit of running by running. If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.

- Epictetus

Quote of the Day

None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Wisdom Of The Week

William Lee Miller in his book Lincoln's Virtues explains beautifully in two simple sentences, the metamorphosis of Lincoln:

There would never come a time when Abraham Lincoln abandoned the role of politician, or rose above it to some allegedly higher moral realm. What he did instead as a lifelong politician was to realize that role's fullest moral possibilities. 

Quote of the Day

Quote of the Day

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Quote of the Day

Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.

- Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Quote of the Day

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

- The Persistence of Memory by Carl Sagan

Quote of the Day

Curiosity is antifragile, like an addiction it is magnified by attempts to satisfy it.

- Nassim Taleb

Quote of the Day

A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

- George Santayana

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

Q: What does your workday look like?

A: Well, I have always sought, since I quit law practice [in 1965], to have a lot of time in every day to read and think. And talk to a few friends about this or that. And I don’t do that because it will make me more money, I do it because it’s my nature. And I had to use that nature because I needed a living for a big family. But it’s just my nature.

Warren’s the same way. We both hate too many appointments in one day. We both have long segments [of free time]. The lives we live would look to anybody else like academics.

[---]

Q: How much time do you spend reading in a typical day?

A: Oh, it’s huge. I read myself to sleep every night. I read enormously. I like doing it. Not only that, what I found very early in life was that once I learned to read and handle elementary math, I really didn’t need professors or anything. I could figure out almost anything I wanted better from the written material than from having some professor tell it to me, because he’d be going too fast or too slow or telling me something I already knew or didn’t want to know. And so of course I like doing it by reading.

You look at [Andrew] Carnegie and [Benjamin] Franklin, they had a few years of primary school, they learned everything by themselves by reading. Whatever they needed, they just learned. It’s not that hard. Imagine educating yourself by firelight, no lamps, no electricity, after a day’s brutal work. Our ancestors had it tough.

[---]

Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas. I knew early in life that that would be a useful knack and I’ve honed it all these years, so I’m pleased when I can destroy an idea that I’ve worked very hard on over a long period of time. And most people aren’t.

[---]

Q: Why is it so hard to overturn entrenched ideas?

A: It’s insane. I’m fixing a lot of insanity. But that’s my standard thing. I don’t know how to do anything complicated. I know how to avoid insanity, even if it’s conventional. That’s all I know. I don’t even try to be smart. I just try and be not insane and pay no attention to the traditions.

You want the architecture to facilitate the world the way it is and the world the way it’s going to be, not the way the world has been, and it’s not very difficult. It’s just the most elementary common sense. But you’ve got to throw away some of the old precedents, which are stupid.

The interesting question is, when things are perfectly obvious and you have a great profession like architecture, why is everybody so massively stupid? And the answer is it’s hard to be reasonable. There are a million tricks the human mind plays on its owner. That’s what causes stupidity. Think of how many times you’ve said to yourself, ‘Why in the hell did I do that?’

It’s just massively stupid. I don’t like massively stupid. Berkshire tries to take the decision-making power, where it’s important, out of the hands of the stupid and put it into the hands of those people that are good at thinking. That’s our secret.

[---]

Q: Someone once asked you what accounts for your investing success, expecting a long complex answer, and you famously replied, “I’m rational.” So how do you define rationality?

A: People who say they are rational [should] know how things work, what works and what doesn’t, and why. That’s rationality. It doesn’t help if you just know what’s worked before, because if you know why, then you’ll be better at it. So rationality is: Across a broad range of disciplines, you know what works and what doesn’t and why.

[---]

Q: But why isn’t Berkshire easier to emulate?

A: We’re talking about very simple ideas of just figuring out the standard stupidities and avoiding them. And I actually collect them!

Some people collect stamps. I collect insanities and absurdities. And then I avoid them, and it’s amazing how well it works, because I’ve gone by [the examples of] all these people that are more talented than I am.

If I had set out to invent more quantum mechanics, I would’ve been an also-ran. I just set out to avoid the standard stupidities, and I’ve done a lot better than many people who mastered quantum mechanics.

And it’s a way for mediocre people to get ahead and it’s, it’s not much of a secret either. Just avoid all the standard stupidities. There are so many of them, and so many brilliant people do it.

[---]

Q: I wouldn’t ask most people this, but I’m sure you won’t mind. What would you want the first paragraph of your obituary to say?

A: Both Warren and I feel it’s our moral duty to be as rational as we can possibly be. A lot of people who are brilliant in some ways tend to make these utterly asinine decisions in other ways. We both tend to collect the asininities of the world in a kind of checklist. And we try to avoid everything on the checklist.

- Charlie Munger, Unplugged

Quote of the Day

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

- Marcel Proust

Quote of the Day

A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to the things outside their control.

- @naval

Quote of the Day

Throw aside all hindrances and give up your time to attaining a sound mind.

- Seneca

Quote of the Day

The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

- Adam Smith

Quote of the Day

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

It is the ‘wild’ intelligences ... those beyond our constraints,  to whom the future belongs.

- Hans Moravec

Quote of the Day

Education isn't something you can finish.

- Isaac Asimov

Wisdom Of The Week

Fred Rogers's 2002 commencement address at Dartmouth College (via Kottke)

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.

I have a lot of framed things in my office, which people have given to me through the years. And on my walls are Greek, and Hebrew, and Russian, and Chinese. And beside my chair, is a French sentence from Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince. It reads, “L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.” What is essential is invisible to the eye. Well, what is essential about you? And who are those who have helped you become the person you are? Anyone who has ever graduated from a college, anyone who has ever been able to sustain a good work, has had at least one person, and often many, who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.

It’s not the honors and the prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted. That we never have to fear the truth. That the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices, is very good stuff.

Quote of the Day

On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

- Charles Babbage

Quote of the Day

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

- Aristotle, Selected Writings From The Nicomachean Ethics And Politics

Quote of the Day

- Hanah Arendt

Quote of the Day

Americans, however, recoil in horror from these intolerable impositions on personal liberty. Some of us are apparently even, like Mr. Stein, canny enough to see the shadow of the death camps falling across the whole sordid spectacle. We know that civic wealth is meant not for civic welfare, but should be diverted to the military-industrial complex by the purchase of needless weapons systems or squandered through obscene tax cuts for the richest of the investment class. We know that working families should indenture themselves for life to predatory lending agencies. We know that, when the child of a working family has cancer, the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, and then probably die, but not before his or her family has been utterly impoverished.

We call this, I believe, being free. And as long as we have access to all the military-grade guns we could ever need to fight off invasions from Venus, and to assure that our children will be slaughtered at regular intervals in their schools, what else can we reasonably ask for?

- David Bentley Hart