Category: Sage Advice
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The Matter of Memory
Today's deeds are the matter of tomorrow's memories. So act today that tomorrow's memories won't be regrets.
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Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom and its Limitations
I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late…
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Advice for the Oversensitive
Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Doubleday, 1992, tr. C. Maurer, # 173): Don't be made of glass in your dealings with others. Even less so in friendship. Some people break very easily revealing how fragile they are. They fill up with resentment and fill others with annoyance. They are more sensitive than…
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On Budgets
I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits.…
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The Vital Imperative: Live Well, Live Now
This is it. This is your life, right here and right now. The present is as real as it gets. If you are not doing with your life right now what you think you ought to be doing with it, then you are doing something wrong. After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Towers,…
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Petty Misfortunes
We should give our own petty misfortunes the same attention we give those of others, which is to say, not much.
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Seize and Squeeze
Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson: . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as…
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The Pointlessness of Worry
The dreaded event will either occur or it will not. If it occurs, then the worrier suffers twice, once from the event, and once from the worry. If it does not occur, then the person suffers from neither. Therefore, worry is irrational. Make provision for the future, be aware of the possibilities of mishap, take…
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Bucket List
Give some thought to the question whether the entries on it just might precipitate an early kicking of it.
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Right and Wrong Order
Right Order: Finish your schooling; find a job that promises to be satisfying over the long haul and stick with it; eliminate debts and save money; get married after due consultation with both heads, especially the big one; have children. Wrong Order: Have children; get married; take any job to stay alive; get some schooling…
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Love Your Opponent
"We should love both: those whose opinion we follow, and those whose opinion we reject. For both have applied themselves to the quest for the truth, and both have helped us in it." St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book XII, Lecture 9.
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The Bitch Impecunia
Many are the goddesses that tempt the young, the romantic, the idealistic. Time's alchemy will cause the masks of some to slip and reveal the bitch Impecunia. Cirmcumstances straitened by devotion to one's art or one's cause are better tolerated in the days of youth. I do not advise that you abandon your high aspirations:…
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Striving
Striving, we find what we can accomplish. But we also experience our limits, some of which are not merely ours but humanity's. Both upshots of striving are salutary. Learning what we can and cannot do we learn the extent of our powers and thereby who and what we are. Self-knowledge is good. So strive.
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People Are What They Are . . .
. . . and they don't change. No doubt there are exceptions. Few and far between, they prove the rule. As a rule of thumb, one most useful in the art of living, assume that Schopenhauer was right in his doctrine of the unalterability of character. Never enter into an important relationship with a person, marriage…
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The Citadel of the Here and Now
Retreat ever and again into the citadel of the Here and Now, and the dragons of elsewhere and elsewhen will turn to chimeras.