Stoic Teacher

It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all. ~ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience ✒️

His own life suddenly seemed repellently formal. Whom did he know or what did he know and whom did he love? Sitting on the stump under the burden of his father's death and even the mortality inherent in the dying, wildly colored canopy of leaves, he somehow understood that life was only what one did every day.... Nothing was like anything else, including himself, and everything was changing all of the time. He knew he couldn't perceive the change because he was changing too, along with everything else. ~ Jim Harrison, Legends of the Fall ✒️

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead. ~ Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front ✒️

Nu pot fi eu insumi decat daca ma inalt pana la furie sau cobor pana la descurajare: la nivelul meu obisnuit, ignor faptul ca exist. ~ Emil M. Cioran ✒️

Problems in science are sometimes made easier by adding complications. ~ Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life ✒️

İnsanoğlu nedense anlayamadığı şeylere kötülemeye meyilli. ~ Elif Shafak ✒️

Sure, I could tell you I am no longer a lesbian or that I am no longer attracted to women and am straight, or I could even tell you the moon is made of cheese. I could tell you many things, but the moon will still not be made of cheese, and I will still not be attracted to men. ~ Cristina Marrero ✒️

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. ~ Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing ✒️

A farm includes the passion of the farmer's heart, the interest of the farm's customers, the biological activity in the soil, the pleasantness of the air about the farm -- it's everything touching, emanating from, and supplying that piece of landscape. A farm is virtually a living organism. The tragedy of our time is that cultural philosophies and market realities are squeezing life's vitality out of most farms. And that is why the average farmer is now 60 years old. Serfdom just doesn't attract the best and brightest. ~ Joel Salatin, Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front ✒️

I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I crossed the street to avoid them; had they been black, I probably would have taken another street entirely. And I'm misogynistic. I admit that, too. I'm a shitty cook, and a worse house cleaner, probably in great measure because I've internalized the notion that these are woman's work. Of course, I never admit that's why I don't do them: I always say I just don't much enjoy those activities (which is true enough; and it's true enough also that many women don't enjoy them either), and in any case, I've got better things to do, like write books and teach classes where I feel morally superior to pimps. And naturally I value money over life. Why else would I own a computer with a hard drive put together in Thailand by women dying of job-induced cancer? Why else would I own shirts mad in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and shoes put together in Mexico? The truth is that, although many of my best friends are people of color (as the cliche goes), and other of my best friends are women, I am part of this river: I benefit from the exploitation of others, and I do not much want to sacrifice this privilege. I am, after all, civilized, and have gained a taste for "comforts and elegancies" which can be gained only through the coercion of slavery. The truth is that like most others who benefit from this deep and broad river, I would probably rather die (and maybe even kill, or better, have someone kill for me) than trade places with the men, women, and children who made my computer, my shirt, my shoes. ~ Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe ✒️

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials. ~ John Dewey, Experience and Education ✒️

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions - and maturely wise in our replies. ~ Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading ✒️

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love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers. ~ George Santayana ✒️

Saepe creat molles aspera spina rosas" - "Often the prickly thorn produces tender roses ~ Ovid ✒️

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis. ~ Seneca ✒️

He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates. ~ George Orwell, 1984 ✒️

...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he. ~ Plato, The Symposium ✒️

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency. ~ Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology ✒️

The three most important words in a relationship are not, 'I love you,' but, 'Tell me more. ~ Stefan Molyneux ✒️