Let us pray.....................

 

They may love dogs, read Victor Hugo novels, and prefer suits from Savile Row, but they are not like us.

And we should pray that we are never like them.

-Michael Wade, from his latest

responded......................

 

Remember the bad times as well as the good.  Life is hard and always has been.  You are what you are today not just because of the music you blasted or the traditions you followed but because of how you responded to the bad times.

-Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion

genius.......................

Napoleon’s definition of a military genius was quote, the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind. I’m going to repeat that because it is such a ridiculously good quote. A military genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.

It is the exact same in investing to be a good investor over time. You don’t need to make a lot of genius decisions. You just need to be merely average when everyone else is making bad decisions, as many people are.

-Morgan Housel, from this blog post

A little bit of wisdom............

 What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.

-Kevin Kelly

the line separating..................

 It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

Marcus says........................

". . . nothing can be good for a man unless it helps to make him just, self-disciplined, courageous, and independent; and nothing bad unless it has the contrary effect."

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight, 1.

Making some rather large assumptions....

If, for example, good meant intelligent, and virtue meant wisdom; if men could be taught to see clearly their real interests, to see afar, the distant results of their deeds, to criticize and coordinate their desires out of a self-cancelling chaos into a purposive and creative harmony—this, perhaps, would provide for the educated and sophisticated man the morality which in the unlettered relies on reiterated precepts and external controls.  Perhaps all sin is error, partial vision, foolishness?  The intelligent man may have the same violent and unsocial impulses as the ignorant man, but surely he will control them better, and slip less often into imitation of the beast.  And in an intelligently administered society—one that returned to the individual, in widened powers, more than it took from him in restricted liberty—the advantage of every man would lie in social and loyal conduct, and only clear sight would be needed to ensure peace and order and good will.

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy