Showing posts with label open mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open mind. Show all posts

Thursday, March 25, 2021

A life is not such a tremendous time to learn to express your ideas.

Henry Adams

Tuesday, December 03, 2019

We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers employments.
 

The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory. 

Montaigne

Monday, December 03, 2018

Montaigne on Death

But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give us no assistance at all.  A man may by custom fortify himself against pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.  There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but they are none of them come back to tell us the news....
 

Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a philosopher, a friend of his: “Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now? what is she doing?  What are you thinking of?”--“I was thinking,” replied the other, “to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.” 


Michel de Montaigne

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

An open mind is okay, but you should fill it first.

JG, said in class.