Every prophecy

Every prophecy is a parody.

Puzzle pieces (Pirsig)

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Foolishness

Find the grandest thing you can, and let it guide your contemplation of foolishness.

Semantics

A slaughter is a skirmish with better weapons.

This sorry Scheme of Things (Khayyám)

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Omar Khayyám

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Face it

If you can't place it you can't face it.

Complex arrays (Puett & Gross-Loh)

Just as the world itself is fragmented, we are too. Instead of thinking of ourselves as single, unified selves who we are trying to discover through self-reflection, we could think of ourselves as complex arrays of emotions, dispositions, desires, and traits that often pull us in different and contradictory ways. When we do so, we become malleable. We avoid the danger of defining ourselves as frozen in a moment in time.

Michael Puett & Christine Gross-Loh,
The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life

Indulgence

The greatest indulgence is to indulge in satiety surrounded by stimulation.

Damage

What damages the human spirit more than marriage?

On poetry

Poetry:  Layered meaning in layered sound.

New poems

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Quiche

It is that humans (Confucius)

It is not that the Way broadens
humans; it is that humans
broaden the Way.

Confucius, the Analects

Worse (Knott)

All my life I had nothing
but worse than that,
I wouldn't share it.

Bill Knott, "Worse"

New poems

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Foolishness

Foolishness is not redeemed by bravery.

Untainted

Every religious comfort, every joy, has a secular equivalent untainted by falseness—or at least, by that falseness.

What you wish

What you wish to discover, you should imbue.

What you wish to imbue, you must discover.