A cynic is a narcissist who can’t handle the indifference of the world.
The notebook · Notes
The mere mechanical business of touching the keys sharpens my thoughts.
— Henry Miller
Notes for
later.
Observations, fragments, and ideas that needed somewhere to live before they disappeared.
Evil exists by virtue of there being more than one thing.
Every generation has to relearn the obvious.
Fairness is giving everyone their share. Goodness is giving from yourself to others at the expense of fairness. Taking from someone to give to others is government.
The paradox of ignorance is that it has an answer to every question.
Questions prompt change. Answers preserve the status quo.
Communication happens in the head of the receiver.
My biggest addiction? The intoxicating fog of my convictions.
One forgets that the root of culture is cult.
Cynicism has to be earned.
There is more goodness in fairness than there is fairness in goodness.
Mediocre men witness arrogant geniuses and imitate the only thing they can: their arrogance.
He wanted to swim; at the same time, he wanted to sit with a coffee and watch himself swim.
The human universe is not one of truth. It’s a universe of true enough.
If you think you have the answers, you stop asking questions.
There lies a paradox at the heart of the individual: he is the hero of civilization, yet he can become that hero only through others.
You preserve a tradition, bad or good, by turning the idea of protecting it into a virtue.
The psychological content of the human - the need to belong, to appear good, etc. - is exploited by ideas, just as viruses exploit the machinery of their hosts, to propagate themselves among the population and persist there indefinitely.
A tradition of criticism, in the spirit of Popper, is then needed to counteract stale memes. Such a tradition, of course, is itself a meme that exploits some vital content of the human psyche.
You can judge a people fairly well by how they manage traffic.
Weak men show their strength through cruelty.
To be an adult means to be responsible for your ignorance.
Clichés are stale truths.
The most stubborn illusion: that of being good.
Your character has already determined which philosophies you will adopt.
We do not lament enough the loss of childhood.