Sunday, August 25, 2019

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)

Thursday, August 22, 2019

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

Wednesday, July 31, 2019

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

Monday, July 22, 2019

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

Friday, June 28, 2019

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

 

Friday, June 21, 2019

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


Tuesday, June 18, 2019

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

Sunday, June 16, 2019

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

Bruno Snell on Xenophanes 

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events. 

Montaigne

Tuesday, June 04, 2019

He strikes at all who fears all.

Emperor Claudius, as quoted by Montaigne

Sunday, May 26, 2019


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Chris Deliso, in the yet unpublished Third Emperor of California

Sunday, May 12, 2019

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

Attributed by Montaigne to Emperor Julian (the Apostate)

Thursday, May 09, 2019

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

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

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

Saturday, April 06, 2019

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.

Friday, March 29, 2019

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 

Sunday, March 24, 2019

...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

Friday, March 22, 2019

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

What About Me? Quicksilver Messenger Service

Friday, March 01, 2019

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)

Saturday, February 16, 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