The morning is new! Why make it old by the rehearsal of yesterday's rants? The morning is alive! Why mortify it by the re-animation of useless memories?
So I admonish myself, to little effect.
Category: Maxims, Mottoes, Epitaphs, etc.
Vincit qui se vincit
"He conquers who conquers himself." Or as a cognate aphorism of mine has it:
Self-mastery is the highest mastery.
Self-mastery requires the mastery of both desire and aversion, not unto their extirpation as in Pali Buddhism, but sufficiently to render ordinate what is inordinate. The problem is not desire as such, but inordinate desire. Similarly for aversion.
Along the same line, and in paraphrase of Augustine,
The vicious man has as many masters as he has vices.
Or as I say, with maximal pith and precision:
Vices vitiate.
“It Takes One to Know One”
Half of the time.
It takes intelligence to recognize intelligence in others. But the stupid cannot see the stupidity in others — or in themselves.
When we have gold we are in fear . . .
. . . when we have none we are in danger. (English proverb)
A proverb whose pertinence is proven by recent developments. Gold hit 2400 USD/oz. a day or two ago, but has backed off some. Joe Biden and his shills lie their heads off about everything including the health of the economy, but, with respect to the latter, the surging price of gold suggests otherwise.
Doing Well by Doing Good
A successful urologist I know told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good. An excellent formulation, but inapplicable to Joe Biden. He wants to do well whether or not he does good. He wants such trappings and results of worldly success as power and position, money and property, even if he must destroy the country to get them. Good old Traitor Joe, violator of sacred vows, brazen liar, serial plagiarist, slanderer of decent people, threat to the peace and stability of the nation and the world. If you support him, you are as despicable as he is. You might also consider that a vote for him is a vote for Kamala Harris.
You say you don't like Donald Trump? I don't like him that much either. But politics is a practical pursuit. It is not about perfect versus imperfect but about better versus worse. I invite you to give some thought to the question whether you and your family and the nation and the world will be better off with another term of Trump or another of Biden. I invite you, for your own good, to inform yourself and exercise whatever critical faculties you possess.
He Who Hesitates is Lost
Sometimes, however, it is better to look before you leap.
Note this curious philo-lang point: 'he' above, though grammatically classifiable as a pronoun, does not function logically as a pronoun: it has no antecedent. It functions as a sex-neutral universal quantifier, or rather, it functions as an individual variable bound by a universal quantifier. Thus the maxim translates as 'For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.'
“It Takes One to Know One”
Sometimes it doesn't. I know that Kierkegaard is a genius and that I am not.
First they came for the Saturday people . . .
. . . then they came for the Sunday people.
Carpe Noctem
To make good use of the night, don't load the mind with dreck before drifting off.
Political Action
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien
The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.
Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration: Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.
Read more at Substack.
Noetic Distance
You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.
A Philosopher’s Last Words
What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.
Secretum Meum Mihi
On the topic of Latin mottoes, Edith Stein's is from Isaiah 24, 16:
From the ends of the earth we have heard praises, the glory of the just one. And I said: My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me: the prevaricators have prevaricated, and with the prevarication of transgressors they have prevaricated.
A finibus terrae laudes audivimus gloriam iusti et dixi secretum meum mihi secretum meum mihi vae mihi praevaricantes praevaricati sunt et praevaricatione transgressorum praevaricati sunt.
Edith Stein wrote the phrase, Secretum meum mihi ("My secret belongs to me," Mein Geheimnis gehört mir) to her friend, the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the morning after Stein's conversion experience in the summer of 1921. Her conversion was occasioned by her reading of the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila a copy of which she found in the library of Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Martius.
One is reminded of the Tolle, Lege passage in St. Augustine's Confessions.
Nisi duae res necessariae
Maxims and Meta-Maxims
1) Live now: resist the tendency to bring the past into the present.
2) Beware of viewing yourself through the belittling eyes of others.
3) Avoid negative and weakening thoughts.
4) Avoid comparisons with others.
5) Keep socializing to the minimum necessary to maintain one's sanity and humanity.
6) Do not associate with those beneath you except as duty and necessity require.
7) Guard the mind, the tongue, the heart.
8) Abide in the here, the now, the self.
9) Aspire.
10 Strive and persevere.
11) Begin the day with a review of these and other maxims.
12) Maxims ought to be part of one's 'everyday carry.' Don't leave home without them.
13) Age quod agis!
14) Indulgence weakens; resistance strengthens.
15) Coin new maxims.
16) Carpe diem et noctem!