People will say anything, which is why one should not let oneself become upset over (almost) anything anyone says.
Do you know the word bushwa? We ought to raise it from its desuetude.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
Seduction and Rebuff
This world seduces us with its goods, but then rebuffs us with its evils, as if to say,
I am good and beautiful but only because of my source in Goodness and Beauty. So love me, not for myself, idolatrously, but for what I make manifest.
Top Dog
Being crown of creation, man's wolf is man himself.
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Is the above sentence grammatical? If it isn't, then it shows that from time to time grammaticality is justifiably sacrificed on the altar of aphoristic elegance.
Of Veils and Visibility
I glance for a brief moment at a trio of women, two facially unveiled, the third thinly veiled. The face of the veiled one attracts my attention. The visibility of her face is helped, not hindered, by its being veiled. I generalize: it is not always and everywhere the case that veils are impediments to visibility. In some circumstances veils reveal by concealing.
This insight, I suspect, can be put to good (analogical) use. Just how, however, presently escapes me. So I file it away for future reference.
Travel
Travel can be good when it is a flight from the familiar that breaks the complacency of the daily round to expose the insecurity ever present but hidden by and behind the quotidian.
The Need for Doxastic Risks
There are truths we are not in a position to know that we need to believe for our own good.
Intellect, Emotion, Projection
It takes intellect to discern that people are dominated by their emotions, but the intellectual who is capable of understanding this is often prevented from understanding it by his tendency to project his intellectuality into others. We often have a hard time appreciating that others are not like us and do not value what we value, or if they do, not to the same extent. My younger self used to make this mistake.
Poverty and Plenty
Material plenty allows the leisure to contemplate one's moral and intellectual and spiritual poverty. So money, far from being the root of all evil, is often conducive, and sometimes necessary, for the uprooting of some evils.
Related: Radix Omnium Malorum. This is one of my best entries. It definitively refutes the widespread notion that money is the root of all evil.
Impotent Transcendence
Awareness of our limits suggests that we are beyond them. But it is an impotent transcendence that leaves us stuck with them.
Are We Sick?
If we are just animals, why aren't we content to be just animals?
Ambition Beyond Ability
He who is ambitious beyond his abilities courts unhappiness.
Practice Refuting Theory
You deny that there is truth, and yet you bitterly resent being lied to?
On Honoring Revolutionaries
To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative.
Marital Compatibility
She looked for her father and found him in me. I looked for the opposite of my mother and found anti-mater in her.
Literary Stride
We adjust our stride to the steepness of the terrain: the steeper the trail, the shorter the steps. A good writer watches his literary stride: the more difficult the subject matter, the shorter the sentences. Back on the flat he leaps and lopes and stretches his legs.