Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wisdom. Show all posts

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Fortune Cookies


 All time fortune cookie:
The great pleasure in life 
is doing what people say you cannot do.


 Fortune cookie of the week:
A person of words and not of deeds
is like a garden full of weeds.


 Watching the sunrise outdoors statistically increases your odds of having a good day. And needing a nap after lunch. Firefox.7.11.17


The plural of anecdote is not data. :)

Tara Goddard
@GoddardTara


Don't tell me why it won't work.
Tell me what you tried that didn't work.
Carlin Black, DuPont, 1966 

To try and fail is at least to learn; 
to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.
 Chester Barnard


Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized.  
Daniel_Burnham


But I have no beliefs. Belief gets in the way of learning.
Lazarus Long


It's not the mistakes that count,
it's what you do after them that counts.
-Thelonious Monk

Thanks Paige Wroble for the find.

The weather right now in Seattle is cold and rainy.
It will get better--about April.
Horizon Air preflight announcement.

If it is to be it is up to me to do it.
John Tee-Van
 He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes;
He who does not ask a question remains a fool forever.


There are two kinds of men who never amount to much:
Those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else
Cyrus H.K.Curtis

 Wisdom is knowing what to do next;
Skill is knowing how to do it;
Virtue is doing it. 


 Learn from the mistakes of others.  
You haven't the time to make them all yourself.


 Minds are like parachutes: 
they function only when open.




"Butterflies are not insects, they are self-propelled flowers."
Captain John Sterling. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Robert A.
Heinlein, 1985.


 

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Sprichwörter

 My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light.
Edna St. Vincent Millay 


I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
James Baldwin
 
Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that,
Robinson Jeffers 


Note to self:
You can't control how other people recieve your energy.
Anything you do or say gets filtered through the lens of whatever shit they are going through at the moment.
Which is not about you.
Just keep doing your thing with as much integrity and love as possible.
- Nanca Hoffman
Posted on Facebook by The Earth Tribe:
Edit J'C


What some call luck
Is simply pluck
And doing things 
Over and over

Perseverance and skill
Courage and will
Are the four leaves
Of Luck's clover
Anon per Google


There is no such thing as luck;
There is only adequate or inadequate preparation
To cope with a statistical universe. 
Dr. Samuel C. Russell, Have Space Suit - Will Travel, RA Heinlein, 1958


The Virile Mind
One of the most striking things about the virile mind is that at the end of its thinking there is always a question mark.  The ignorant man finds it easy to convince himself that what he does not know is not worth knowing.  It is only those who are willing to go on learning, who becoome aware of how vast are the realms of to be explored beyond the farthest reach of their own understanding.
Peter Fletcher



"What makes my truth mythology and your mythology truth?"
A Hopi "Cathy"
Quoted on Facebook by friend Brian King



 “Where's your church?”

“We’re standing in it.”

“But this is a bookstore and it’s a Friday.”

“Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we’ve ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space.”

 From Forrest Church’s A Chosen Faith

In biology when an experiment goes wrong it stinks. 
In chemistry when an experiment goes wrong something blows up. 
In physics when an experiment goes wrong nothing happens. 
Hat tip to Paul Lewis on Facebook

I like to feel that I've paid rent on the piece of earth I'm using.             Hilda Burroughs.  The Number of the Beast, R.A.Heinlein, 1980.

We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.
Thích Nhất Hạnh

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Wisdom From Imaginary Entities

beliefnet. 

You may have knowledge of Donald Duck but can Donald Duck give you knowledge and wisdom? Answer: no, therefore Donald Duck has no objective existence he is just a cartoon character.willieHindu

Even imaginary beings can impart knowledge and wisdom.  For many children in the early days of television, the cartoons provided many of their moral and social skills.  As well as an introduction to classical music.  Please note that the script writers were anonymous at least as far as the kids are concerned.  It was the characters that provided the message.  Don't bother with a rant about the bad messages, although discussion of the messages would be welcome, the beauty of fictional wisdom is that one can choose that which seems wise and reject the garbage.

I prefer to get my history from fiction rather than from the biased "historians."  A successful fiction writer will be in tune with the ethos of herm time or hesh will not not sell.  I suspect mining wisdom from the remainder shelves is about as useful as mining it from the history shelves.  One must account for the bias evident in the story, a good story is inevitably biased, but given the bias the wisdom supporting the bias is useful data.   Incidentally the perceived bias of the author is irrelevant.  Creators are telling stories to the culture which will sell.  If their own dysfunctional bias becomes too prominent the story will not sell.   


Humans are story learning creatures, and whether the story has an identifiable author or is simply part of the culture it is always a good story, with unequivocal morals. Also note that stories can take many forms, verbal are the most common including those using music as a mnemonic, but some art and recently visual stories are threatening to become the dominant story telling form.  Visual stories are not new it is just that technology has made them easier to produce and distribute.    

There are two additional fictional sources of wisdom: Fable and Scripture. Both are specifically collections of folk or tribal wisdom, frequently by identifiable authors who happen to be great story tellers.  Most of the Pentateuch stories that everybody can recite from memory and frequently used as lessons are from the Yahwist.  The main difference between fable and scripture is that one is expected to find and learn the wisdom from fable while scripture is generally expected to be taken whole as wisdom.  In some religions scripture is TRUTH™ and for a particular translation every word is accepted as reflecting the will of God.  "God" capitalized is universally used as the god created by Abram or possibly his tribe and adopted under many names or symbols by the many religions and sects and cults that accept Abram as the founding patriarch. 

If one treats scripture as fable that is some wisdom and some garbage it becomes a valuable source of wisdom about our friends and adversaries that are believers. 
 

Friday, July 8, 2011

Existential Issues in Belief

Beliefnet - Religion and Mind

It is the belief not the existence of the referent that causes all the problems. A person believing in the reality of John Galt as a living, historical person, is not going change herm behavior if you can prove that Galt never existed outside of the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Better to attack the belief itself as dysfunctional than waste time attacking the referent.

Perhaps wisdom is being able to learn values for living independent of the existential reality of the originator of those values. I think I have learned many useful values, and rejected as many as useless from Jesus whether or not he ever existed as per the stories told about him. I can say the same about Lazarus Long who certainly never existed. Why is the existence of either an issue.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Collective consciousness defined.

Don't Stereotype Atheists - Beliefnet Forums: "I do find credible evidence for a 'collective consciousness' which is separate from the individual consciousness and accessible to individuals in times of emotional stress. It is nothing supernatural, just a multi-processor reservoir for the collected wisdom and lore of a tribe. The manifestation of this reservoir is called God by many tribes, and in these tribes rituals are created to reinforce the ability to access this collected wisdom called God."