Saturday, September 13, 2025
A virtuous cycle....................
Regular meditation will support better sleep. Better sleep will allow deeper and more profound meditation.
opportunity........................
While we tend to think of inspiration as bolt-from-the-blue, God-given brilliance, this instant form of ideation tends to be much rarer than the other kinds—plenary, moral, mechanical, and dynamical—that the medieval intellectuals listed. But most often, an opportunity begins as a failure. That's why most of us miss it.
-Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion
Yes..................
Isn't it essential precisely to refuse to embrace limitation, so as to surpass the status quo, to demolish the assumption that life as we know it is as good as we should ever expect it to get?
-Oliver Burkeman, Meditations for Mortals
It's personal.....................
My observation of people has forced me to the conclusion that personal initiative is largely based on personal desires and ambitions. The man who appears to have no individual initiative, awakens and moves under his own initiative in a hurry when he becomes obsessed with some definite strong desire or purpose.
-Andrew Carnegie, as quoted here
Choices..........................
The prior writes back, overflowing as ever with spirit and new ideas. "Like love, sometimes hope is a choice," he writes. "Of course you will know the great Cornel West quote about that, yes? The difference between hope and optimism?" The former is a leap beyond all evidence while the other is simply an attempt to work with what it knows.
"It's a choice I make," he continues, "There's a beautiful album I heard the other day on Spotify, mostly flute, a little vocal. Called 'I Will Not Be Sad in This World.'"
-Pico Iyer, Aflame: Learning From Silence
a prisoner of hope....................
Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.
-Cornel West, couldn't find the source of this quote, but it follows the same vein as this commencement address
Let me count the ways..............
Condorcet wrote as though social progress is inevitable, and wars and revolutions were just Europe's way of sorting itself out.
His serene assurance arose from the conviction that culture is governed by laws as exact as those of physics. We need only understand them, he wrote, to keep humanity on its predestined course to a more perfect social order ruled by science and secular philosophy. . . .
Condorcet, however mistaken in details and hopelessly trusting of human nature, made a major contribution to thought through his insistence that history is an evolving material process. "The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences," he declared, "is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant. Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature."
-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Smarts.......................
The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligence of every person in the room.
-Scott Kelly, as quoted here
bred...........................
There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts. But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin's evolution and, but extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.
When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people. As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit. Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.
Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother's print shop in Boston. He was not awed by establishment elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords. He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner. And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.
For a long time he had cherished vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire. But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subjugating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar. Once it was clear that Britain remained intent of subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
one archetype......................
Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy. He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes. He was equally distrustful of the elite and the rabble, of ceding power to the well-born establishment or to an unruly mob. With his shopkeeper's values he cringed at class warfare. Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Not so subtle parenting......
This was obviously directed at an audience beyond that of his son, who was already 40 and the governor of New Jersey. There was, however, a subtext directed at him: William had taken on airs since becoming governor, and he was far more enamored of the aristocracy and establishment than his father. The autobiography would be reminder of their humble origins and a paean to hard work, thrift, shopkeeping values, and the role of an industrious middle class that resisted rather than emulated the pretensions of the well-born elite.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Early industrial espionage...........
His tour of midland and north England in the company of two fellow scientists gave Franklin the chance to study the Industrial Revolution that was booming there. He visited an iron and tin factory in Rotherham, the metal casting shop in Birmingham, and a silk mill in Derby where 63,700 reels were turning constantly "and the twist process is tended by children of about 5 to 7 years old." . . .
Franklin had denounced English mercantile trading laws, which were designed to suppress manufacturing in her colonies, by arguing (a bit disingenuously) that she would never have to fear that America would become an industrial competitor. In his letters from his tour in 1771, however, he sent detailed advice about creating silk, clothing, and metal industries that would make the colonies self-sufficient. He had become "more and more convinced," he wrote his Massachusetts friend Thomas Cushing, of the "impossibility" that England would be able to keep up with America's growing demand for clothing. "Necessity therefore, as well as prudence, will soon induce us to seek resources in our own industry."
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
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