"I could not become anything: neither bad nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something ( Read more... )

There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.

-- Piet Hein

You know that a rainbow appears when sunlight is refracted by tiny droplets of water, with each color of light being diverted through a slightly different angle and bouncing back from the raindrops to meet the observing eye. But if that's all there is to a rainbow, why don't the billions of differently colored light rays from billions of raindrops ( Read more... )

If ye lay bound upon the wheel of change ( Read more... )

I know a lot of people who don't live around here. Today it occurred to me that it would make sense to have a cell phone plan where I have unlimited anytime calling to five local numbers, plus a couple of hundred minutes' worth of miscellany. I can then use phone cards with local access numbers to translate this in to cheap unlimited long distance ( Read more... )

Where there is to be creative action, it is quite beside the point to discuss what we should or should not do in order to be right or good. A mind that is single and sincere is not interested in being good, in conducting relations with other people so as to live up to a rule. Nor, on the other hand, is it interested in being free, in acting ( Read more... )

"The sense of not being free comes from trying to do things which are impossible and even meaningless. You are not 'free' to draw a square circle, to live without a head, or to stop certain reflex actions. These are not obstacles to freedom; they are the conditions of freedom. . . . I am not, thank heaven, free to walk out of doors and leave my ( Read more... )

"He knows that almost all of his best ideas come to him when his thinking has stopped. He may have struggled and struggled to understand a problem in terms of old ways of thinking, only to find it impossible. But when thought stops from exhaustion, the mind is open to see the problem as it is -- not as it is verbalized -- and at once it is ( Read more... )

". . . giving way to an opposing force is not at all the same thing as running away. A body of water does not run away when you push it; it simply gives at the point of the push and encloses your hand. A shock absorber does not fall down like a bowling-pin when struck; it gives and yet stays in the same place. To run away is the only defense of ( Read more... )

"Hypocrisy" is one of those words with an obvious, well-understood meaning that gets curiouser the more closely you look at it. In Greek plays the hypokrites was the actor, the pretender, and it's easy enough to see how the modern meaning descended from this -- we call someone a hypocrite who makes a pretense with which their actions stand in ( Read more... )