The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity.

Montaigne

Man is a small kosmos.

Democritus, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

In everything there is a portion of everything else.

Anaxagoras, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national, and constrained to the ends of government.

Montaigne

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

Montaigne

I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature, and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation. 

Montaigne

To be is possible and not-to-be is impossible.... Thought and being are the same.

Parmenides, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.... It is in changing that things find repose.

Men who love wisdom should acquaint themselves with a great many particulars.

Heraclitus (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

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

Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

There is nothing wrong in drinking as much as a man can hold without having to be taken home by a servant, unless of course he is very old.  The man to be praised is he who, after drinking, can still express thoughts that are noble and well arranged.

Xenophranes, per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

While sitting at the fireside in the winter, at ease on soft couches, well fed, sipping tasty wine and nibbling tidbits, it is then that a host may duly inquire of his guest:  Who are you among men, and whence do you come?

Xenophanes, (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics)

To see into thy nature, O Zeus, is baffling to the mind. I have been praying to thee without knowing whether thou art necessity or nature or simply the intelligence of mortals. 

Euripides, The Trojan Women (per Philip Wheelwright, The PreSocratics

Reality

"Reality" [is] a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot "wish them away).... [an] order [that] is relative to a particular socio-historical situation [but] appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil life, are in my opinion very discreet.

Montaigne

It is a marvel that our perceptions are so often correct, given the rapidity, the near instantaneity, with which they are constructed.

Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness

 

The "good"... does not stand for anything that is empirically given.  It always grows out of an impasse, at a moment of indecision; thus it is always the product of a question: what is the good.


Bruno Snell on Socrates

Man's knowledge is imperfect, but the wisdom of god is faultless. 'He sees as a whole, thinks as a whole, and hears as a whole.'

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes

Wisdom is the highest goal of man; our knowledge as such is obscure, but it is illumined by searching.

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes 

Events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events. 

Montaigne

He strikes at all who fears all.

Emperor Claudius, as quoted by Montaigne

Narrative is a lie... it sustains its power from a quite illogical juxtaposition of events, and perceived chain of causality- it is simply seditious, and cannot be trusted!

Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

There is no beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man.

Attributed by Montaigne to Emperor Julian (the Apostate)

Lying is a base vice....  Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society....  it breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government. 

Montaigne

Human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions.  In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

I am not obliged not to utter absurdities, provided I am not deceived in them and know them to be such....

We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength, experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield to none....

This capacity of trying the truth, whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were born with me; they are natural and entirely my own. I produced them crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I have found of the same judgment.

Montaigne, Essays, Second Book, Chapter 17.

For there are these three things that endure: Faith, Hope and Love, but the greatest of these is Love.
Run after love and be zealous for the gifts of The Spirit, that you may know the truth.

1 Corinthians 13-14 

...You have to remember that there are seven and a half billion people on earth and only about fifteen hundred or so of them are billionaires.  There's a kind of penumbra of rich people—another few hundred thousand—and a twilight zone of merely affluent people whose standard of living and location is basically the extent of their wealth, a kind of geopolitical fortune rather than a bankable one, and then basically everyone else is as poor as hell.

Nick Harkaway, Gnomon

I'm a fugitive from injustice
But I'm goin' to be free...

What About Me? Quicksilver Messenger Service

The populist wave coursing through the western world is only the visible part of a soft power emanating from the working classes that will force the elites to rejoin the real movement of society or else to disappear.


Christophe Guilluy, quoted by James McAuley in the New York Review (March 21, 2019)

I have a soul free and entirely its own, and accustomed to guide itself after its own fashion; having hitherto never had either master or governor imposed upon me: I have walked as far as I would, and at the pace that best pleased myself; this is it that has rendered me unfit for the service of others, and has made me of no use to any one but myself.

Michel de Montaigne

Philosophy has not been able to find out any way to tranquillity that is good in common, let every one seek it in particular.

Michel de Montaigne

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, history revealed no pattern other than the regular growth and decline of civilization—a rhythm not essentially different from those found in the natural world. There was no prospect of indefinite improvement. Judged by the standards of the time, civilization might improve for a while. But eventually the process would stall, then go into reverse. Rooted in the innate defects of the human animal, cycles of this kind could not be overcome. If the gods intervened, the result was only to make the human world even more unpredictable and treacherous.

 Christopher Beha, The Myth of Progress, in the February 21, 2019 New York Review of Books.

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

Michel de Montaigne

Emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence.

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem 

Few men come to die in the opinion that it is their latest hour,,,, Which happens by reason that we set too much value upon ourselves; it seems as if the universality of things were in some measure to suffer by our dissolution, and that it commiserates our condition, forasmuch as our disturbed sight represents things

Michel de Montaigne

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

I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she first presents to me; they are all alike to me, I never design to go through any of them; for I never see all of anything…. Of a hundred members and faces that everything has, I take one, one while to look it over only, another while to ripple up the skin, and sometimes to pinch it to the bones: I give a stab, not so wide but as deep as I can, and am for the most part tempted to take it in hand by some new light I discover in it.

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

The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics. 

John Grey, as quoted by Casey Cep in "Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism" in the New Yorker.

 

The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance.

"Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas." —Cicero,
as quoted by Michel de Montaigne

That our opinion gives the value to things is very manifest in the great number of those which we do, not so much prizing them, as ourselves, and never considering either their virtues or their use, but only how dear they cost us, as though that were a part of their substance; and we only repute for value in them.... as it weighs, it serves for so much as it weighs.... the price gives value to the diamond.

Michel de Montaigne

We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

For you, no problem.

Reply at rental car return in Lisboa.