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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Weiner
Read between
September 15, 2021 - March 31, 2022
Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them.
Both men identified desire as the root of all suffering. Both identified tranquility as the ultimate goal of their practice. Both saw the need for a community of like-minded thinkers: the garden for Epicurus, the sangha for the Buddha.
Does the benefit of a given pleasure outweigh the pain exacted?
There’s a name for attention at its most intense and generous: love. Attention is love. Love is attention. They are one and the same. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention,”
Violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim,
“Real beauty,” he said, “is doing good against evil.” All violence represents a failure of imagination. Nonviolence demands creativity. Gandhi was always searching for new, innovative ways to fight.
Fighting, done properly, is productive. Both sides can arrive not only at a win-win solution but something more: a solution that neither would have found had they not fought in the first place. Imagine a soccer match that ends in a tie but with the field greener and healthier than before the game. Gandhi saw fighting not as a necessary evil but as a necessary good. Provided we fight well.
Gandhi abhorred violence, but there was something he hated even more: cowardice. Given a choice between the two, he preferred violence. “A coward is less than a man.” Thus Gandhi’s true objective: reclaiming his nation’s lost virility, and on its own terms. Do that, he believed, and freedom would follow.
Here was a man who attracted “cranks, faddists, and madmen” and embraced them all.
The true battlefield lies within. Arjuna’s struggle is not with the enemy but with himself. Does he succumb to his baser instincts or rise to a higher plane? The Gita, Gandhi concluded, is a disguised ode to nonviolence.
Another tenet of the Gita is nonattachment to results. As Lord Krishna, an incarnation of God, tells Arjuna: “You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction.” Sever work from outcome, the Gita teaches.
Invest 100 percent effort into every endeavor and precisely zero perc...
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Gandhi was not results-oriented. He was process-oriented. He aimed not for Indian independence but for an India worthy of independence. Once this occurred, her freedom would arrive naturally, like a ripe mango falling from a tree. Gandhi didn’t fight to win. He fought to fight the best fight he was capable of fighting. The irony is that this process-oriented approach produces better results than a results-oriented one.
When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. This is why most revolutions fail in the end. Confusing means and ends, they devour themselves. For Gandhi, the ends never justified the means. The means were the ends. “Impure means result in impure ends. We reap exactly as we sow.” Just as you can’t grow a rosebush on toxic soil, you can’t grow a peaceful nation on bloody ground.
Yet something was different. Britain had lost the moral high ground, as well as her appetite to bloody those who steadfastly refused to answer hate with hate.
“Do not lose your temper with anybody, not even with yourself.”
Better to fight for your principles than pretend you don’t have any.
“An opponent is not always bad simply because he opposes,” said Gandhi. He had many opponents, but no enemies. He strived to see not only the best in people but their latent goodness, too. He saw people not as they were but as they could be.
You make your case gently, for your aim, as Gandhi says, is not to condemn but to convert.
Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.
When a student asked Confucius about the afterlife, the Master replied, “If you cannot understand life, how can you understand death?”)
Both were sticklers for definitions. “If words are not right, judgments are not clear,” Confucius said.
“Since you desire status, then help others achieve it, since you desire success then help others attain it.”
“Every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness,”
Kindness is hard. Everything worthwhile is.
Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them,
“Beauty lies in its own vanishing,”
Warring factions sheathed their swords and reached for the calligrapher’s brush. Historian Ivan Morris calls the period, which lasted from AD 794 to 1185, “the cult of beauty.”
If the task of philosophy is, as Nietzsche said, “to enhance our taste for life,”
Implicit in Shōnagon’s philosophy is this: Who we are is largely shaped by what we choose to surround ourselves with.
Life’s bad moments do seem to outweigh the good.
We’re all Sisyphus, the poor slob from Greek mythology condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, for all eternity. I think back to that deck in Montclair, New Jersey, and my friend Jennifer’s question. “What does success look like?” I know how Nietzsche would answer: It looks like radical acceptance of your fate. It looks like Sisyphus happy.
If our life—indeed the entire universe—does repeat, what do we control? Not our actions, Nietzsche thought, but our attitude.
If we do live the selfsame life over and over again in the selfsame way, forever and ever, then what can we do but laugh? Better yet: dance. Don’t wait for a reason to dance. Just dance. Dance feverishly and with abandon, as if no one is watching. When life is good, dance. When it hurts, dance.
‘live in accord with nature’
“I had a good voyage when I was shipwrecked.”
in adversity lies strength, and growth.
“No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a ...
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Stoics do not jettison all emotions, only the negative ones: anxiety, fear, jealousy, anger, or any of the other “passions” (or pathe, the closest ancient Greek word to “emotion”).
An enemy can harm your body but not you.
“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
“Do what you must; let happen what may.”
We can inoculate ourselves against the bite of disappointment by switching from external to internal goals: not winning the tennis match but playing our best game; not seeing our novel published but writing the best, most honest one we are capable of writing. Nothing more, nothing less.
“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”
he didn’t allow his mind to experience, and amplify, what his body had.
“No good man laments, nor sighs, nor groans.” Complaining, Marcus reminds me, won’t lessen the pain and may exacerbate it. “Either way,” he says, “it is best not to complain.”
The goal of Voluntary Deprivation, though, is not pain but pleasure. By occasionally denying ourselves certain comforts, we appreciate them more, and lessen their hold on us.
“to desire what we have.”
“There is no greater satisfaction to be had in life than a leisurely old age devoted to knowledge and learning,”
If there is no jury, there is no verdict.
