Aphorisms and Observations – Page 16

Musing and Using

"Your problems are artifacts of musing about language. Stop musing and stick to using."

Could be, Ludwig, but I doubt it.

One alone has 'skin in the game' of one's own life. This helps explain why the advice of others, however well-intentioned, is often useless or worse. Listen to the advice of others, but at last keep one's own counsel.

Socrates Supplemented

We have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.

Perspective

To be well thought of is good. It is as good as to be ill thought of is bad. But how bad is that?

Praeparatio Mortis

Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment will be all the greater. Or as one of my aphorisms has it:

Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.

Omnia Vanitas?

Omnia vanitas, saith the Preacher of Ecclesiastes.

But if all is vain, so too is the taking note of it; whence one might reasonably conclude that all is not vain.

Vanity is not the last word. It is the penultimate word.

Dolce far Niente

It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies.

Cured by Age

Old age is the sovereign cure for romantic folly and I sincerely recommend it to the young and foolish. Take care to get there. Philosophers especially should want to live long so as to study life from all temporal angles.

Cold and Hard

We become cold and hard to survive in a world cold and hard, one not of our making, thereby contributing to the coldness and hardness from which we set out to protect ourselves. And so, paradoxically, the world is of our making.

Too Shallow a Pond

The world's too shallow a pond to justify one's wanting to make a splash in it.

The Wages of Frugality

Some of us from modest origins will end up with more money than we will ever need or be able to spend. The wages of our frugality will not be spent by us but passed on to benefit others. We credit our success to the old-time virtues. We understand that poverty is more a lack of virtue than a lack of money.

But to suggest that blacks could profit from these old-school virtues will get us branded as 'racists.' Apparently, to the mind of a leftist, a black who can defer gratification is like a black conservative, a 'traitor' to his race, as if race is a political construct.

Such is the real racism of low expectations fueled by 'progressive' reality denial according to which race is a socio-political construct.

Category: Aphorisms and Observations