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January 29 - February 16, 2019
But the past and the future are, on the whole, of less consequence than we think.
The swiftness of time is infinite – something that appears more clearly to people looking backwards.
Even as conversation or reading or deep thought on some subject beguiles travelers, and they find that they have reached the end of their journey before
realizing that they were approaching it, just so with this unceasing and most swift journey of life, which we make at the same pace whether waking or sleeping; those who are preoccupied become aware of it only at the end.
Seneca viewed time as the most valuable thing we own – really the only thing. Yet we guard it with none of the care we apply to our property.
Men are tight-fisted in guarding their fortunes, but extravagant when it comes to wasting time – the one thing about which it is right to be greedy.
This is why I lost my lamp: because a thief was better than I am at staying awake. But he bought the lamp at a high price. In return he became a thief, he became untrustworthy, he became an animal. This seemed to him a good bargain!
The thing for which nothing is paid often comes at the highest price.
Aristippus taunts Diogenes that he would not have to live on lentils if he would learn to flatter the king. Diogenes replies that Aristippus would not have to flatter the king if he had learned to live on lentils.
Another of Montaigne’s was that we look at ourselves in the idealized way that people see anyone with whom they are in love.
It is like the passionate love
it does not hide our faults from ourselves, but persuades us that they escape the notice of others,
Whenever you take offense at someone else’s fault, turn immediately to find the fault most similar in yourself
“That man has already injured me, but I have not yet injured him.”
Even if you have done no evil, you are capable
we are all wicked. Each of us will find inside ourselves whatever fault we rebuke in another….
being wicked, we live among the wicked.
We every day and every hour say things about others that we might more properly say about ourselves,
A man bears the weight of his own body without knowing it, but he soon feels the weight of any other, if he tries to move it; in the same way, a man can see other people’s shortcomings and vices, but he is blind to his own.
