We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, you see. Time just swirls around us. Everything is always present. The things we’ve done, the people we’ve loved, the people we’ve hurt, they’re all still here.... The lie of time. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been is present in the same place. But we still think the thing that has just happened, or is about to happen, we think that’s the most important thing. My memories aren’t memories, my present isn’t present, it’s all the same thing.

Richard Osman, The Last Devil To Die

 

Every act has consequences that change that world in some way, no matter how modest, and those actions will go on changing the world for millennia after we are gone. But to remember the details of every action is to invite madness, to paralyze our brains and our communities with memory.

Gavin Francis, The Dream of Forgetfulness (NYRB, March 9, 2023)

 

Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species…. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time.

John Steinbeck,  The Log from the Sea of Cortez

What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons

We are what we do, not what we think.  Only the interactions count.

Iain Banks, The Player of Games

He who goes into a crowd must now go one way and then another, keep his elbows close, retire or advance, and quit the straight way, according to what he encounters; and must live not so much according to his own method as to that of others; not according to what he proposes to himself, but according to what is proposed to him, according to the time, according to the men, according to the occasions. Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world's handling with clean breeches, escapes by miracle.

Montaigne

Content yourself ... to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.

Montaigne

The internet reminds us on a daily basis that it is not at all rewarding to become aware of problems that you have no reasonable hope of solving.

Jia Tolentino, as quoted in the New York Review by Jonathan Lethem

How many brave individual actions are buried in the crowd of a battle? 

Michel de Montaigne

He who has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither resist nor fly, what can we do with him?

Michel de Montaigne

Everybody has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.


Mike Tyson, as quoted by Avishai Margalit in the NYRB.

Maybe working on the little things as dutifully and honestly as we can is how we stay sane when the world is falling apart.

Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.
 

Michel de Montaigne 

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

He had to ignore the itch, the desire to intervene, for the purpose and significance of action were being corroded away by its thoroughgoing lack of significance.

László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance

If I acted, then the faith would surely follow.  After that, I would believe because I had acted.

John le Carre, Absolute Friends

Sir, it is driving on the system of life.

Samuel Johnson commenting (1781) on why we continue to try, as quoted in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson