Dead Poets Society
To Be Read At The Opening of D.P.S. Meetings: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to …
Culture
A Lesson in Friendship
Around 10:00 pm one night when I was 16 my cell phone rang with a panicked voice on the other side. My best friend was barely able to remain calm enough to get words out of his mouth. After a bit of …
Lincoln on Leadership
Fight the Good Fight The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. Try Honey Before Vinegar If you would win a man to your …
Marcus Aurelius: Debts and Lessons
Marcus Aurelius has been read for 1800 or so years now and he’s arguably just as relevant today as he was when he was ruler of the Roman Empire. “States will never be happy until rulers become …
Henry Miller on Turning 80, Fighting Evil, And Why Life is the Best Teacher
Only 200 copies of Henry Miller’s 1972 chapbook, On Turning Eighty, were ever printed; each hand-numbered and signed. How I ended up with copy 48 is a story for another day. The book contains 3 …
Richard Feynman’s Letter on What Problems to Solve
“No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.” *** In a letter dated February 3rd, 1966, included in the wonderful anthology Perfectly Reasonable …
Henry Miller on The Relationship Between Friendship and Aging
Shortly after his 80th birthday, Henry Miller wrote an essay on aging. More of a treatise on living life, it was published in 1972 in a chapbook titled On Turning Eighty. Only 200 copies of the book …
The Common Pattern To Procrastination
“Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed …
Alan Watts: Why Modern Civilization is a Vicious Circle
“When we compare human with animal desire,” writes philosopher Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety, “we find many extraordinary …
Two Forms of Human Motivation: Gain And Pain
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade …
John Locke’s Method of Organizing Common Place Books
“You know that I voluntarily communicated this method to you, as I have done to many others, to whom I believed it would not be unacceptable.” In 1685 English physician and philosopher …
Daniel Kahneman Explains The Machinery of Thought
Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman is the founding father of modern behavioral economics. His work has influenced how we see thinking, decisions, risk, and even …
Commonplace Books: Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
Commonplace books are personal knowledge libraries; notebooks full of collected ideas and bits of wisdom all mixed up together. Here, we take a look at their history and benefits. *** There is an old …
Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology Hackers and Painters explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” …
The Six Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer
Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while shorter than last year’s, it’s nonetheless full of interesting reads. I ended up ordering two of them, one of which …
Seneca on Gathering Ideas And Combinatorial Creativity
“Combinatory play,” said Einstein, “seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.” Ruminating on the necessity of both reading and writing, so as not to confine ourselves to …