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The meta-goal could be “live in truth.”
This means, “Act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you). While doing so, however, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will, while you act out and articulate the truth.”
Things fall apart. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today.
We can open our eyes and modify what we have where necessary and keep the machinery running smoothly. Or we can pretend that everything is alright, fail to make the necessary repairs, and then curse fate when nothing goes our way.
Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity.
A lie is connected to everything else. It produces the same effect on the world that a single drop of sewage produces in even the largest crystal magnum of champagne.
When the lies get big enough, the whole world spoils. But if you look close enough, the biggest of lies is composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of still smaller lies—and the smallest of lies is where the big lie starts.
Lies corrupt the world.
At the beginning of time, according to the great Western tradition, the Word of God transformed chaos into Being through the act of speech.
To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being.
Truth is the ultimate, inexhaustible natural resource. It’s the light in the darkness.
See the truth. Tell the truth.
Your truth is something only you can tell, based as it is on the unique circumstances of your life.
The truth springs forth ever anew from the most profound wellsprings of Being. It will keep your soul from withering and dying while you encounter the inevitable tragedy of life. It will help you avoid the terrible desire to seek vengeance for that tragedy—part of the terrible sin of Being, which everything must bear gracefully, just so it can exist.
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth.
If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate,...
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In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what ...
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Tell the truth. Or, at least,...
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Psychotherapy is genuine conversation.
Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing.
When you’re involved in a genuine conversation, you’re listening, and talkin...
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Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tel...
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Alcohol temporarily lifts the terrible burden of self-consciousness from people.
After all, if you’re not the leading man in your own drama, you’re a bit player in someone else’s—and you might well be assigned to play a dismal, lonely and tragic part.
Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future.
That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.
I don’t want to be the redeeming hero or the deus ex machina—not in someone else’s story. I don’t want their lives. So, I asked her to tell me what she thought, and I listened.
The people I listen to need to talk, because that’s how people think.
True thinking is rare—just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult.
Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.
True thinking is complex and demanding.
So, you have to learn to give and take and to modify your premises and adjust your thoughts—even your perceptions of the world.
You talk. But you need someone to listen. A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent.
If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. If you’re going to stand your ground, you better have your reasons. You better have thought them through.
You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.
You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.
‘Each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker’s satisfaction.’”
“This is what happened. This is why. This is what I have to do to avoid such things from now on”: That’s a successful memory. That’s the purpose of memory.
A good lecturer is thus talking with and not at or even to his or her listeners.
Only one rule really applies: do not be boring (although it is also very bad form to actually put someone down, when you are only pretending to put them down).
This kind of conversation constitutes active philosophy, the highest form of thought, and the best preparation for proper living.
The conversation of mutual exploration, by contrast, requires people who have decided that the unknown makes a better friend than the known.
So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
She described him as the wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing.
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.
The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through—not as something that merely
What we perceive, when things fall apart, is no longer the stage and settings of habitable order. It’s the eternal watery tohu va bohu, formless emptiness, and the tehom, the abyss, to speak biblically—the chaos forever lurking beneath our thin surfaces of security.
Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs.
There’s no ark, because no one built one, even though everyone felt the storm gathering.
