Negative people elicit negative responses from others. So they suffer twice: from their own negativity and from the negativity they cause.
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
No Man is a Beast Merely
It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man. He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do. Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.
Requite Good with Good
Requite good with good; evil with justice.
On a Saying Often Attributed to George Santayana
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana
Those who can remember the past and are able to learn its lessons are typically not those with the power to make a difference in the present so as to prevent the repetition of the past; and those with the power to make a difference typically either will not or do not remember.
Observations on the Joys of Teaching
Teaching is the feeding of people who aren't hungry.
Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who are neither hungry nor know what food is.
Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one's forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.
Philosophy, like a virgin, is wasted on the young.
The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.
According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.
"I would rather eat dry bread than teach." Franz Schubert, quoted in Maurice J.E. Brown, Schubert: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 233.
"I would rather sweep the streets than teach children!" Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), p. 24. Hone is quoting Sayers.
The quotations borrowed from Dr. Gilleland, antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.
The Sound of Silence
Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man.
Pascal’s Wager: Minimalist Version
Believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits.
At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal
And here we have an animal who aspires. Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end. Or so it seems. If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?
Liberal Bias
Liberal bias leads those in its thrall to deny that there is — liberal bias. Liberalism curiously insulates its acolytes from self-recognition.
Tribalism
One of my darker thoughts is that in the end tribal allegiances trump whatever people piously imagine unites us.
The Higgs Boson
The discovery of it, or rather of evidence of its existence, required the torturing of nature with huge super-colliders. But can we rely on information obtained by torture?
A Use of Old Age
Old age is a good time for the continence whose practice was too difficult in younger days. But wait too long, and your vices will abandon you before you abandon them. Scant is the merit of continence born of incapacity.
Grist and Mill
To live well we need both grist and mill: the grist of experience and the mill of philosophy.
Self-Deprecation
There is usually more of self than of deprecation in self-deprecation.
I Run, Therefore I Think
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of running releases lofty (lüftig) thoughts. Running along the ground one ascends into the aether. Curro, ergo cogito.