Every great sage has maintained that it is impossible to impart wisdom. And it is wisdom we need, not more knowledge or even "better" knowledge. We need wisdom of life, which is a kind of knowledge that only initiates have thus far been known to possess. — Henry Miller
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -)
…that this is the golden age within a lifetime, (mid-twenties to late thirties) when we have transcended the know-it-all arrogance of youth, haven’t yet entered the know-it-all complacency of old age, and live with that wondrous combination of receptivity to new ideas and just enough not-yet-calcified intellectual foundation with which to integrate and contextualize them.
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -)
Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.
Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed…And the most magical thing, the most sacred thing, is that whichever the outcome, we end up having transformed one another in this vulnerable-making process of speaking and listening.
🎂 Happy Birthday Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -)🎂
In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it was like to feel any other way vanishes, until your entire being contracts into the state of what is, unfathoming of what has been, can be, and will be. If Emily Dickinson was correct, and correct she was, that “confidence in daybreak modifies dusk,” the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn.
And yet daybreak does come, with a shock and a rapture, to find us asking ourselves in half-belief: “What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?”
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. — Alan Bennett
A Sunday Fiction Series by Socrates Black
Every great sage has maintained that it is impossible to impart wisdom. And it is wisdom we need, not more knowledge or even "better" knowledge. We need wisdom of life, which is a kind of knowledge that only initiates have thus far been known to possess. — Henry Miller
