Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Other People

    We need those distorting mirrors called other people to achieve self-knowledge.  For a distorting mirror, while it distorts, also mirrors.

  • Eyes in the Mirror

    The eyes you see in the mirror when you look at yourself are not seeing eyes but seen eyes.  Strange but true:  your seeing eyes are and must remain invisible.

  • Use and Abuse

    Abuse is no argument against right use.

  • Political Burden of Proof

    As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

  • An Old Man’s Lament

    "My old friends are dead," he said, "and my new ones will never be old."

  • The Monetary Criterion

    When are people serious?  When money is involved — their money. My mind drifts back to faculty meetings in which half-listening colleagues doodled and dozed.  But when salary considerations came to the table, the dullest among them pricked up their ears. Suddenly they became sharp and serious.

  • Grievance

    A life well-lived cannot have grievance as its organizing principle.

  • Micro-Aggression

    When macro-aggression is no more, when wrongs have been righted and justice has been promoted and protected to the extent that it can be by government, it is then that leftists invent micro-aggression to keep themselves in business and assure themselves of an ever-expanding clientele of victims and losers.  

  • Vita Brevis

    One who lives long better appreciates that life is short.

  • Doubly Foolish

    Even if what we cling to could last, what we cling with can't.  Our clinging is doubly foolish.

  • Homo Viator

    We are not at home in this world, a fact more likely to be revealed by travelling than by staying home. 

  • It’s Enough

    Standing on a hill behind my house, looking down on it, the thought occurred to me: It's enough.  One modest house suffices.  And then the thought that the ability to be satisfied with what one has is a necessary condition of happiness. Satisfied with what one has, not with what one is. Perhaps it is…

  • George Carlin

    The poor guy died in adolescence.

  • The Additivity of Small Amounts of Money

    He who is penny-foolish will also be pound-foolish.

  • Horror

    The horror of a life completely entangled in the finite, lost in the mundane, swamped by the senses, mesmerized by the social.