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October 15 - November 5, 2024
healthy dose of pessimism is necessary in our ability to adequately deal with this life.
No one is perfect or normal in any traditional sense. No one knows who or why they are. We all make mistakes, big and small. Happiness is hard and unclear.
t]he only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.”
Perhaps all reality is a prison and time is its guard.
I know that I know nothing.
“Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life for he who has understood existence.”
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
By considering, or at least pondering time and how to best use it, one is paradoxically using it well.
“The safest way of not being very miserable is not to expect to be very happy,”
It was not that he made his work sad, but that his sadness made his work.
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy . . . Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books.
