The company we keep away from is as salient for our flourishing as the company we keep.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
A Life Well Lived
A life well lived must include inquiry into the well-lived life.
Courage and Convictions
Having the courage of one's convictions cannot be worth more than the convictions themselves.
Tête-à-tête
Better tête-à-tête than mano a mano.
The World’s Criterion of Worth
Something is worth doing if and only if one is paid to do it.
The theme is developed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.
Will We Even Be Forgotten?
Not only will we be forgotten, we will be forgotten by people who never really knew us in the first place. So we will not even be forgotten. You can't remember or forget a person you never knew.
Devil or Angel?
That she is strongly attracted to you does not decide the question.
Envy versus Schadenfreude
"Your gain is my pain" versus "Your pain is my gain."
My analyses of envy, jealousy, Schadenfreude, pity, etc.
Who is a Friend?
A friend is someone with whom one can disagree in the way one diagrees with oneself: gently and without rancour.
A Sign of Aesthetico-Moral Progress
One's coming to see more beauty in buttes and mesas than in butts and mammaries.
The Dogmatist
Craving certainty, but lacking it, he fabricates a substitute, his dogma.
Melanie Phillips on the Anti-Family Left
Melanie Phillips is a former lefty who wised up, illustrating my aphorism that
The only good leftist is a former leftist.
There is More to Life than Politics
There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way some engagement in it is necessary.
The Inconclusiveness of Argument
He who can follow an argument will also know how not to be led by it.
A Callable Loan
We who thrive get used to being alive, and forget we have our lives on loan, a loan that can be called on the spot without advance notice. Compare James 4:13-17 (NIV):
13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. 17 If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.