أنا أدعم فلسطين
relaying
Applies to all of these quotes when spoken aloud lol… I sometimes try to say this before reciting a quote, only to butcher it as well lmao:
"A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
plato: is speech superior to writing?
Here are some passages from Phaedrus by Plato
Enough of the art of speaking; let us now proceed to consider the true use of writing. There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men's memories and take away their understandings. From this tale, of which young Athens will probably make fun, may be gathered the lesson that writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture, which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well as in his own.
—Plato, Phaedru
Speech being part of the natural soil of human soul, gorg.
They recognize 'a POETICAL necessity in the writings of their favourite author, even when he boldly wrote off just what came in his head.' They are beginning to think that Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about to disappear from the world. And would not a great painter, such as Michael Angelo, or a great poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth, 'courteously rebuke' us—would he not say that we are putting 'in the place of Art the preliminaries of Art,' confusing Art the expression of mind and truth with Art the composition of colours and forms; and perhaps he might more severely chastise some of us for trying to invent 'a new shudder' instead of bringing to the birth living and healthy creations? These he would regard as the signs of an age wanting in original power.>
cf.
He next proceeds with enthusiasm to define the royal art of dialectic as the power of dividing a whole into parts, and of uniting the parts in a whole, and which may also be regarded (compare Soph.) as the process of the mind talking with herself. The latter view has probably led Plato to the paradox that speech is superior to writing, in which he may seem also to be doing an injustice to himself. For the two cannot be fairly compared in the manner which Plato suggests. The contrast of the living and dead word, and the example of Socrates, which he has represented in the form of the Dialogue, seem to have misled him. For speech and writing have really different functions; the one is more transitory, more diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and times; the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and is uttered not to this or that person or audience, but to all the world. In the Politicus the paradox is carried further; the mind or will of the king is preferred to the written law; he is supposed to be the Law personified, the ideal made Life.
cf.
e-motional physics
So many different thinkers across diverse fields that I respect seem to be of the notion that an emotion is supplanted by a stronger one, or not at all. That a force greater or equal to a current psychic force is required to dislodge it. Or, sublimate it. But there, in sublimation, which I view as a sort of multipartite process, a chipping away at, and definitely not a one fell swoop, seems to contradict this. So whenever I find something of this flavor I want to capture it.
"An emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emotion contrary thereto, and with more power for controlling emotion."
—Spinoza in Ethics book 3, prop 7:
Nietzsche's idea of amor fati, aka the embrace of life in its totality, points also to this necessity to have a direct confrontation with a psychic force that would otherwise steer the individual. The idea of self-overcoming that pervades his work is of course another pointer to this necessity / law as well in my mind. This applies to figuring out what you really truly deeply want to do... helpful is a modern version of crap diem, oops, carpe, the Regret Minimization Framework:
What choices can you make today that minimize the regret you'll feel as an 80-year-old looking back on your life? When you minimize future regret, you sleep well knowing you're maximizing fulfillment.
applied to software engineering:
Which project would I most regret not having accomplished by the time I'm 80—given the motivations I have for the foreseeable future?
Jung, too, where his individuation theory is more and more I realize a cousin of amor fati:
"What you resist, persists."
or
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate."
William James wrote something in this flavor:
"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another."
and Frankl:
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
On W3C and standards
Validity, in this scenario, is an ideological construct. The promise is that by hewing to the rules put forth by the W3C, your site will be accessible to more people than would a less valid page. Both pages work fine for most people; browsers are tolerant of all sorts of folderol. The ultimate function of any standards body is epistemological; given an enormous range of opinions, it must identify some of them as beliefs. The automatic validator is an encoded belief system. Not every Web site offers valid HTML, just as not every Catholic eschews pre-marital sex. The percentage of pure and valid HTML on the web is probably the same as the percentage of Catholics who marry as virgins.
RADrugs
He understood intuitively that only a radical conversion to something equally satisfying to the individual at a deep level can promote recovery. Furthermore, he sensed the intense loneliness forced upon addicts by the shame and secrecy of their addiction, not unlike the sense of isolation he himself had experienced as a child and adolescent. He likened the growing sense of alienation of an addicted person to being "outside the protective wall of human community."
DWYL HENNY
In life, you will become known for doing what you do. That sounds obvious, but it's profound. If you want to be known as someone who does a particular thing, then you must start doing that thing immediately. Don't wait. There is no other way. It probably won't make you money at first, but do it anyway. Work nights. Work weekends. Sleep less. Whatever you have to do… We have these brief lives, and our only real choice is how we will fill them. Your attention is precious. Don't squander it. Don't throw it away. Don't let companies and products steal it from you. Don't let advertisers trick you into lusting after things you don't need. Don't let the media convince you to covet the lives of celebrities. Own your attention — it's all you really have. if we live in an attention economy, then couldn't we enrich ourselves with spending our attention on ourselve.
from What does "robust" data mean?
robust is usually a word that applies to an algorithm's ability to return correct and useful output (or at least mitigate damages and fail gracefully) in the face of hostile input such as missing values, evolving distributions of feature inputs, increasing/decreasing dimensionality and to some extent misinformation and environments in which it couldn't have been expected to succeed. The opposite of robustness might be brittleness, like a pane of glass that shatters when struck. The holy grail of machine learning is a totally Robust algorithm that learns under any possible circumstance.
SPRIT IN THE MACHINE
A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells.
—Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1984)
"People love the idea of a malevolent puppeteer because it denies the existence of individual agency"
- Hamliton Norris
Pema Chödrön
DISCOMFORT—THE MOTHER OF ALL GREAT DEEDS
(reminder: your comfort zone will kill you, literally and figuratively)
So how do we relate to that squeeze? Somehow, someone finally needs to encourage us to be inquisitive about this unknown territory and about the unanswerable question of what's going to happen next.
Right there in the uncertainty of everyday chaos is our own wisdom mind.
The state of nowness is available in that moment of squeeze. In that awkward, ambiguous moment is our own wisdom mind. Right there in the uncertainty of everyday chaos is our own wisdom mind.
We need encouragement to experiment and try this kind of thing. It's quite daring, and maybe we feel we aren't up to it. But that's the point. Right there in that inadequate, restless feeling is our wisdom mind. We can simply experiment. There's absolutely nothing to lose. We could experiment with not getting tossed around by right and wrong and with learning to relax with groundlessness.
When anything difficult arises—any kind of conflict, any notion of unworthiness, anything that feels distasteful, embarrassing, or painful—instead of trying to get rid of it, we breathe it in. The three poisons are passion (this includes craving or addiction), aggression, and ignorance (which includes denial or the tendency to shut down and close out). We would usually think of these poisons as something bad, something to be avoided. But that isn't the attitude here; instead, they become seeds of compassion and openness. When suffering arises, the tonglen instruction is to let the story line go and breathe it in—not just the anger, resentment or loneliness that we might be feeling, but the identical pain of others who in this very moment are also feeling rage, bitterness, or isolation.
We breathe it in for everybody. This poison is not just our personal misfortune, our fault, our blemish, our shame—it's part of the human condition. It's our kinship with all living things, the material we need in order to understand what it's like to stand in another person's shoes. Instead of pushing it away or running from it, we breathe in and connect with it fully. We do this with the wish that all of us could be free of suffering. Then we breathe out, sending out a sense of big space, a sense of ventilation or freshness. We do this with the wish that all of us could relax and experience the innermost essence of our mind.
The main point of these methods is to dissolve the dualistic struggle, our habitual tendency to struggle against what's happening to us or in us.
ADDICTION
shenpa
We could think of this whole process in terms of four R's: recognizing the shenpa, refraining from scratching, relaxing into the underlying urge to scratch and then resolving to continue to interrupt our habitual patterns like this for the rest of our lives. What do you do when you don't do the habitual thing? You're left with your urge. That's how you become more in touch with the craving and the wanting to move away. You learn to relax with it. Then you resolve to keep practicing this way.
To we could also call shenpa "the urge"—the urge to smoke that cigarette, to overeat, to have another drink, to indulge our addiction whatever it is. Sometimes shenpa is so strong that we're willing to die getting this short-term symptomatic relief. The momentum behind the urge is so strong that we never pull out of the habitual pattern of turning to poison for comfort. It doesn't necessarily have to involve a substance; it can be saying mean things, or approaching everything with a critical mind. That's a major hook. Something triggers an old pattern we'd rather not feel, and we tighten up and hook into criticizing or complaining. It gives us a puffed-up satisfaction and a feeling of control that provides short-term relief from uneasiness.
When we're hooked on the idea of good experience, self-absorption gets stronger; when we're hooked on the idea of bad experience, self-absorption gets stronger. This is why we, as practitioners, are taught not to judge ourselves, not to get caught in good or bad.
nietzsche
BEYOND GOOD AND EVILL
"WE, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF"
Perhaps it is some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subjectand ego-superstition has not yet ceased doing mischief, perhaps a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts.
But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of the nightmare of Dogmatic Philosophy, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a healthier sleep, we, whose duty is wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the denial of the perspective--the fundamental condition of life…
With such a tensely strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals; the European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice atttempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow→
But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we Good Europeans, and free, VERY free spirits--we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! and perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows?
What questionable questions!
It is already a long story; yet it seems as it if were hardly commenced.
That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? Who is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT REALLY IS THIS WILL TO TRUTH IN US? IN FACT WE MADE A LONG HALT AT THE QUESTION AS TO THE ORIGIN OF THIS WILL. AND ANOTHER QUESTION: THE VALUE OF THIS WILL. WHY NOT RATHER UNTRUTH? EVEN IGNORANCE?
AND COULD IT BE BELIEVED THAT IT AT LAST SEEMS TO US AS IF THIS Problem HAD NEVER BEEN PROPOUNDED, BEFORE, AS IF WE WERE THE FIRST TO DISCERN IT, GET SIGHT OF IT, AND RISK RAISING IT? FOR THERE IS RISK IN RAISING IT, PERHAPS THERE IS NO GREATER RISK.
[…] besides being probably made form some corner, perhaps form below—"frog perspectives"
does perhaps more value belong to delusion, selfishness and cupidity than to true, positive, and the unselfish?
Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself with such dangerous Perhapses! FOR THAT INVESTIGATION ONE MUST AWAIT THE ADVENT OF A NEW ORDER OF PHILOSOPHERS WHO WILL HAVE OTHER TASTES AND INCLINATIONS, THE REVERSE OF THOSE HITHERTO PREVALENT—PHILOSOPHERS OF THE DANGEROUS "PERHAPS".
The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. How far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions are the most indispensable to us—without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—THE RENUNCIATION OF FALSE OPINIONS OWULD BE A RENUNCIATION OF LIFE, A NEGATION TO LIFE. TO RECOGNIZE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE—that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.
philosophers: They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk of "inspiration") whereas, in fact, a prejudiced proposition, idea, or "suggestion," which is generally at their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.
what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of is the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography—moreover, the moral the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true, vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. IS IT NOT WISE TO FIRST ASK ONESELF: WHAT MORALITY DO THEY AIM AT?
accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is the rathe rod philosophy' but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument.
for every impulse is imperious, and as such, attempts to philosophize. imperious: assuming power without justification; arrogant and domineering.
In the philosopher there is absolutely nothing impersonal: his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to WHO HE IS—in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other.
Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but "Nature's conformity to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly, as though—why, it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad "philology." It is no matter of fact, no "text," but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the democratic instincts of the modern soul! "Everywhere equality before the law—Nature is not different in that respect, nor better than we": a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic—likewise a second and more refined atheism—is once more disguised. "Ni dieu, ni maitre"—that, also, is what you want; and therefore "Cheers for natural law!"—is it not so? But, as has been said, that is interpretation, not text; and somebody might come along, who, with opposite intentions and modes of interpretation, could read out of the same "Nature," and with regard to the same phenomena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relentless enforcement of the claims of power—an interpreter who should so place the unexceptionalness and unconditionalness of all "Will to Power" before your eyes, that almost every word, and the word "tyranny" itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, or like a weakening and softening metaphor—as being too human; and who should, nevertheless, end by asserting the same about this world as you do, namely, that it has a "necessary" and "calculable" course, NOT, however, because laws obtain in it, but because they are absolutely LACKING, and every power effects its ultimate consequences every moment. Granted that this also is only interpretation—and you will be eager enough to make this objection?—well, so much the better.
THE MAGIC OF THE EXTREME, THE SEDUCTION THAT EVERYTHING EXTREME EXERCISES
He wanted, he writes, "to feel something, to break through the anesthesia, to prove to myself that I wasn't just asleep."
How did "Nietzsche cultivate the existential defiance or courage that led him up the mountain?" Kaag asks.
It probably started something like this—in a very simple refusal to act on behalf of one's obvious self-interest. There remains a life-affirming glee in such a refusal—a quiet temptation that even the most well-adjusted person feels at various points.
As Kaag advanced along Nietzsche's trek, his refusal started to take the form of fasting so intense, it often left him dizzy. When he finally relented, he stumbled into a luxury hotel and ordered a sickeningly opulent multicourse meal.
His reversal was radical—and, in some ways, utterly Nietzschean: "The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises," Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power
THE WILL TO POWER
To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.
MISC
Look I shout. We are the great miracle of creation! But from some blows this miraculous body cannot repair itself! How--! Words fail me. Look at these men! I recommence. Men! Those in the crowd who can crane to look at the prisoners, even at the flies that begin to settle on their bleeding welts. […] It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockraoches, ants, in their various ways.
FEARS AND UNPRODUCTIVE RELIEF
"What deep-seated inner fears drive us to seek unproductive forms of relief? Dr. Theodore Rubin's book, Compassion and Self-Hate, suggests that our fears of failure, perfectionism, and overwhelming expectations prevent us from pursuing and achieving humanly attainable goals and relationships. A fear of failure leads us to believe that even minor errors make us worthless and awful. A fear of being imperfect makes it hard to accept ourselves as we are—imperfect and perfectly human. Consequently, we interpret any criticism, rejection, or judgment as a threat to our fragile grasp on perfection. A fear of impossible expectations causes us to fear that even after hard work and achieving our goals, we'll only face ever-higher and more challenging goals, leaving no time to rest and savor our accomplishments."
VICTIM/PROCRASTINATOR? YOUR CALL
"Certainly others are frequently in positions of power to affect you and your job, and they might even try to judge your work or your skills. But they can never make you into a victim or a procrastinator. Only you can do that."
… victimville lol
Have you ever kept a log of how you spend your time? It's a really powerful way to bring awareness to your routines. The simple act of logging your behavior dramatically alters it!
WALKING ACROSS A SOLID BOARD
"To better understand how you learned to procrastinate, I invite you to use your imagination and to accept for a few minutes a metaphor in which the test, job, or task in your life is to walk a board. Situation A. The task before you is to walk a solid board that is thirty feet long, four inches thick, and one foot wide. You have all the physical, mental, and emotional abilities necessary to perform this task. You can carefully place one foot in front of the other, or you can dance, skip, or leap across the board. You can do it. No problem. Take a minute to close your eyes, relax, and imagine yourself in that situation. Notice how you feel about this task. Are you scared or blocked in any way? Do you feel any need to procrastinate? Fear of failing or making
A mistake cannot be an issue here, but you might find that you delay starting out of a need to assert your independence and to resist being asked to do even a simple task such as walking a board. Situation B. Now imagine that the task is just the same, to walk a board thirty feet long and one foot wide, and you have the same abilities; only now the board is suspended between two buildings 100 feet above the pavement. Look across to the other end of the board and contemplate beginning your assignment. What do you feel? What are you thinking about? What are you saying to yourself? Take a moment to notice how your reactions in this situation differ from those you had in situation A. Notice how rapidly your feelings about the task change when the height of the board changes and the consequences of falling are greater."
This protocol can also be described, as a cognitive strategy, as a bias toward action:
- what am i stressed about this at the moment:
- In this moment, I can take this specific step:
- (Sweet. Now take it. :)
MUSTurbating
Need to watch how often we use "have to" and realize that every time we say "I have to" we're effectively diminishing our power. Not a good idea.
Seneca (see Notes on Letters from a Stoic) says:
"There is nothing the wise man does reluctantly."
While Carlos Castaneda (see Notes on The Wheel of Time) tells us:
"We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye."
Are you throwing "I have to…" around a lot these days? Let's play a game and see how often we say that phrase and step into a more empowered position, shall we?!?
perfectionism is a defense mechanism
Holding on to an image of perfection will make you afraid of seeing what your real product will look like, it will keep you from preparing for failure with a plan that helps you bounce back, and it will increase your tendency to abandon your project when confronted with a normal problem in the developmental process.
Replace demands for perfect work with acceptance of (not resignation to) your human limits. Accept so-called mistakes (really feedback) as part of a natural learning process. You need selfcompassion rather than self-criticism to support your courageous efforts at facing the unavoidable risks of doing real, imperfect work rather than dreaming of the perfect, completed project. You'll want to be especially gentle with yourself as you recognize that, as a novice, you must go through awkward first steps before you achieve the assurance of a master. As you learn to expect and accept imperfect early steps on your projects, you'll build in the persistence of a producer, and you'll be better prepared to bounce back because you'll have a safety net of compassion.
You'll make some, but so what? That's why they're called mis-takes
Each time you choose to switch your energy from your procrastination self-talk to the language of the producer, you are wiring in a new track of brain cells—a new neural pathway in your brain. After you switch from the old path to the new several times, the new associations will strengthen, becoming easier to initiate, while the old ones will atrophy. Each time you make a conscious decision to create safety for yourself and to speak the language of the producer, you will be unlearning the habits of a procrastinator while strengthening the new healthy habits of a producer.
On Subconscious Overriding Sleeping
Insomnia sometimes arises when the subconscious has some unheard grievance about how you're spending your time. Like…no one consciously chooses to fall asleep, you can set up all the prerequisites consciously, but that final moment of tipping over into sleep requires teamwork from a different, non-conscious part of the brain. Like a relay race between conscious and subconscious. A lot of times there's some subconscious desire for fun, rest, leisure, daydreaming, distraction, and all that "yin energy" rest and recovery stuff that people dismiss as pointless. Saying you've been living a very scheduled, demanding, regimented lifestyle is consistent with that kind of thing throwing off sleep. At the end of the day, the subconscious parts of your brain feel they've had no "me time," no time to goof off and mind wander and be spontaneous, so they create that time by carving it out of your sleep time. It's a kind of brinkmanship too, because with the subconscious grabbing hours at one end and the conscious grabbing hours at the beginning, eventually something will have to give.
On Friendship
Two wonderful quotes from John O'Donahue:
"One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between words."
and
"When was the last time you had a great conversation? A conversation that wasn't just two intersecting monologues, but when you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost, and the sense of an "eventive" conversation that brought the two of you into a different plain and then forthly, a conversation that continued to sing afterwards for weeks in your mind? Conversations like that are food and drink for the soul."
Dostoyevksy - the first psychologist
"There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind."
… according to Nietzsche : ) I would agree.
emotions tew much l8ly? do stuff
“...realign your life toward getting done what reality sends that needs doing. In other words we advise you to focus more on purposeful behavior. Let the feelings take care of themselves. What I think you will find is that when you get good at doing what needs doing in your life, the feelings stop giving you such trouble. And even if your feelings become troublesome, when you are involved in constructive activity, they remain in perspective. Feelings cease to be the whole show."
—David Reynolds, A Handbook for Constructive Living
and in the same vein:
"Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not."
—Thomas Huxley
thoughts how to keep commitments
The concern with this reasoning is it doesn't really solve your problem. Although you've moved past blaming external circumstances, you haven't moved any closer to a solution. Until you find a way to somehow increase your willpower or self-discipline, you will still keep failing to keep your commitments.
To start making better commitments, write out any commitment you make with perfect clarity and precision. There should be no vagueness and possible loopholes should be filled up. If this is a very important commitment you may want to get a friend to help you enforce it to avoid slipping.
Every kept promise to yourself creates more self-trust which builds the foundations of more discipline in the future.
To make more firm resolutions you need to make more of them and complete more successfully. Disciplined people have created a high degree of self-trust between their various states of mind. This self-trust allows them to carry out orders made in the past even when they don't feel like it.
If you find yourself continually failing to keep a commitment then you either need to start smaller or add more leverage. Either the law you enacted is too strict to be upheld by the Nation of You or the punishments and rewards you have in place aren't enticing enough to follow it.
español + français
[!NOTE] ESFR These were in notes I had from learning Spanish and French, as I tend to start off by learning some quotes that float around my head often. I find that starting off at max difficulty, translating each word for word, is the best way to go about things. Doing so, in addition to just picking up an adult level novel, and doing the same, allowed me to be fluent in Swedish before I even arrived in the country after a mere 8 months of study.
Vous, les hommes supérieurs, croyez-vous que je sois là pour refaire bien ce que vous avez mal fait? ou bien que je veuille dorénavant vous coucher plus commodément, vous qui souffrez? Ou vous montrer, à vous qui êtes errants, égarés et perdus dans la, des sentiers plus faciles? Non! Trois fois non! Il faut qu'il en périsse toujours plus et toujours des meilleurs de votre espèce,--car il faut que votre destinée soit de plus en plus mauvaise et de plus en plus dure. Car c'est ainsi seulement--ainsi suelement que l'homme grandit vers la hauteur, là où la foudre le frappe et le brise: assez haut pour la foudre! Mon esprit et mon désire sont portés vers le petit nombre, vers les choses longues et lointaine: que m'importerait votre misère, petite, commune et brève?! Pour moi vous ne souffrez pas encore assez! Car c'est de vous que vous souffrez, vous n'avez pas encore souffert de l'homme. Vous mentiriez si vous disiez le contraire! Vous tous, vous ne souffrez pas de ce que j'ai souffert.
En lugar de decir yo no valgo nada, la mentira moral dice por boca del decadente: nada hay que tenga valor, la vida no vale nada.
Se muere siempre porque uno mismo quiere.
El valor de una cosa consiste en lo que se haga por obtenerla.
Para los iguales igualdad, para los desiguales desigualdad.
Amar la sexualidad es amar a la vida, la veneración de la creación de vida, afirmación del triunfo de la vida sobre la muerte.
La liberación del hombre, la ruptura de las cadenas que le mantienen aún atado al animal, pasa por la superación de los perjuicios morales.
El camino más corto no es siempre el más recto, sino el que tiene el viento a favor de nuestras velas.
Más respeto a los competentes, el público deberá fiarse de su criterio.
"¿Qué es la verdad? Un ejército móvil de metáforas, metonimias, antropomorfismos, en una palabra, una suma de relaciones humanas que han sido realzadas, extrapoladas, adornadas poética y retóricamente y que, después de un prolongado uso, a un pueblo le parecen fijas, canónicas, obligatorias:…"
No sabemos todavía de dónde proviene el impulso hacia la verdad: pues hasta ahora solamente hemos hablado de la obligación que la sociedad establece para existir, la de set veraz, es decir, usar las metáforas usuales, así pues, dicho en términos morales, de la obligación de mentir según una convención fija, de mentir borreguilmente en un estilo obligatorio para todos.
"Por lo demás, detesto todo lo que no have más que instruirme sin aumentar mi actividad o vivificarla inmediatamente. Con estas palabras de Goethe,…"
"…porque lo superfluo es enemigo de lo necesario."
…lo que haya podido dar una mayor dimensión y una realización más hermosa al concepto dehombre ha de tener una existencia eterna para poder seguir haciéndolo eternamente.
Porque lo que por lo pronto quieren es una sola cosa: vivir a cualquier precio.
"El hecho de que algo se haya convertido en antiguo produce entonces la exigencia de que tenga que set inmortal;…"
"Con harta frecuencia, sin embargo, la objetividad no es más que una frase."
"… vivimos todavía en la Edad Media y la historia es todavía teología encubierta: del mismo modo que la reverencia con que el profano ain't jeno a la ciencia trata a la casta científica en una reverencia legada por el clero. Lo que antes se daba a la Iglesia se da ahora, aunque e menor escala, a la ciencia:…!
"Nunca se necesitó tanto de educadores morales y nunca fue tan improbable encontrarlos."
"La mayor parte de los libros han nacido, realmente, de vapores y humos de las cabezas."
"Porque en el hombre moderno la avidez por la forma bella que dicta la moda se corresponde con la fealdad de su contenido;…
[…] cuanto más espíritu, más sufrimiento […] Y también: cuanta más estupidez tanto mayor bienestar.
from julian.com on writing:
I often prefer to write when mores would dictate that one 'man up and make a phonecall' for the very reasons listed below—why leave things to chance logorhea when you can be as precise as possible?
Writing is a laxative for the mind. When you write, your brain can't stop itself from drawing connections between ideas and exploring their implications. Writing slows down your thinking so that you can play with your ideas. This also shines a light on broken logic, which helps you gain clarity.
"I write so I don't sound like an idiot when I speak." —Charlie Bleecker