Timeless Ideas | September 5, 2020
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
Be silent or let thy words be worth more than silence.
— Pythagoras
II.
The person who writes for fools is always sure of a large audience.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
III.
All cruelty springs from weakness.
— Seneca
Ideas
I.
There are two ways you can live: you can devote your life to staying in your comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom. In other words, you can devote your whole life to the process of making sure everything fits within your limited model, or you can devote your life to freeing yourself from the limits of your model.
Michael A. Singer in The Untethered Soul
II.
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly — you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over.
Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now
III.
Powerful people never waste time. Outwardly they may play along with the game — pretending that power is shared among many — but inwardly they keep their eyes on the inevitable few in the group who hold the cards. These are the ones they work on. When troubles arise, they look for the underlying cause, the single strong character who started the stirring and whose isolation or banishment will settle the waters again.
Robert Greene in The 48 Laws of Power
Articles Worth Reading
I.
Huw Green | Aeon
People with delusions show no evidence of being particularly illogical, nor dramatically biased in their thinking. Often schizophrenic delusions involve not belief in the unreal but disbelief in something people take to be true . Given this, perhaps we should be trying to understand people with delusions not only in terms of how they reason, but also in terms of what ideas and beliefs they do and don’t already hold.
II.
Preparing Your Mind for Uncertain Times
Eric Weiner | The Atlantic
Humans abhor uncertainty, and will do just about anything to avoid it, even choosing a known bad outcome over an unknown but possibly good one. We take it as a given that uncertainty is always bad and, conversely, that certitude is always good. There are two ways to solve the “problem” of the unknown: by decreasing the amount of perceived risk or by increasing our tolerance for uncertainty. Most of us focus almost exclusively on the former. Many philosophers think this is a mistake.
III.
The Polish Phrase That Will Help You Through Tough Times
Olga Mecking | BBC Travel
In Poland, the concept of ‘Jakoś to będzie’ is acting without worrying about the consequences. Literally, the phrase means ‘things will work out in the end’ – but it’s so much more than that. Rather than sitting around and hoping things will work out by themselves, 'Jakoś to będzie' is the unwavering certainty that we can do anything, no matter what obstacles we face along the way. It’s reaching for the impossible. It’s taking risks, and not being afraid.
Want to read more? You can read the full archives here and other posts on our website as they are published.
Was this email forwarded to you? Join the club by signing up below: