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September 6 - September 10, 2021
To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
Education makes the wise slightly wiser, but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
In nature we never repeat the same motion; in captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive-stress injury. No randomness.
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.
People don’t like it when you ask them for help; they also feel left out when you don’t ask them for help.
We tend to define rudeness less by the words used (what is said) than by the status of the recipient (to whom it is addressed).
They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status—but rarely for your wisdom. Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.
I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.
Sometimes people ask you a question with their eyes begging you to not tell them the truth.
It is the appearance of inconsistency, and not its absence, that makes people attractive.
People reserve standard compliments for those who do not threaten their pride; the others they often praise by calling “arrogant.”
It is not possible to have fun when you try.
For life to be really fun, what you fear should line up with what you desire.
Religion isn’t so much about telling man that there is one God as about preventing man from thinking that he is God.
Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.
What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.
Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.
I wonder how many people would seek excessive wealth if it did not carry a measure of status with it.
You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.
People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.
Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.
I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.
Fitness is certainly the sign of strength, but outside of natural stimuli the drive to acquire fitness can signal some deep incurable weakness.
Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons.
People tend to whisper when they say the truth and raise their voice when they lie.
Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can’t keep it himself.
The fact that people in countries with cold weather tend to be harder working, richer, less relaxed, less amicable, less tolerant of idleness, more (over) organized and more harried than those in hotter climates should make us wonder whether wealth is mere indemnification, and motivation is just overcompensation for not having a real life.
The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.
We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.
When I look at people on treadmills I wonder how alpha lions, the strongest, expend the least amount of energy, sleeping twenty hours a day; others hunt for them.
You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
We unwittingly amplify commonalities with friends, dissimilarities with strangers, and contrasts with enemies.
The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what’s worse, the opposite.
Never rid anyone of an illusion unless you can replace it in his mind with another illusion.
Beauty is enhanced by unashamed irregularities; magnificence by a façade of blunder.
To understand “progress”: all places we call ugly are both man-made and modern (Newark), never natural or historical (Rome).
We love imperfection, the right kind of imperfection; we pay up for original art and typo-laden first editions.
Most people need to wait for another person to say “this is beautiful art” to say “this is beautiful art”; some need to wait for two or more.
Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.
If we are the only animal with a sense of justice, it would clearly be because we also are about the only animal with a sense of cruelty.
We are most motivated to help those who need us the least.
True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
We find it to be in extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it “national pride.”
Never take advice from a salesman, or any advice that benefits the advice giver.
I trust everyone except those who tell me they are trustworthy.
