The Provisional Scriptures of the Planet Gaia

Appendix C - The Collected Sayings and Desiderata

Aesthetics

• Action which goes beyond talk is more powerful than action which stays as only talk.
• Caring about what you are doing is often taken for granted. When you want to hurry something, it means you no longer care about it and would rather be doing other things.
• Most people live by selling something; if it is not their goods or their work, then it is their care, or their appeal.
• Extreme busy-ness is a sign of wanting to avoid doing something else.
• It’s not enough to just interpret the world; we should contribute to improving it.
• It’s better to be a beggar than to work with bad grace.
• Planned actions hardly ever attain their intended goal; progress arises haphazardly out of a senseless mixture of error and violence.
• The cautious seldom err, but any progress they make will only be slow.
• We do most things without conscious thought, assuming that current patterns of events will continue.
• Whatever you or I do is only partly responsible for how events turn out.
• Willing is like solving a puzzle - we are not sure we can, until we try.

Aesthetics

• Aesthetics is concerned with what is beautiful. But since the aspects of beauty cannot be easily defined, we cannot find definite knowledge in it.
• Aesthetic appreciation carries a danger of cliques who are ‘in the know’ and who despise those who are not.
• Art and religion are close bedfellows; both are certainly a work of the human imagination.
• Art enters into our world and makes it shine; it should fire our imagination and somehow convey human potential.
• Art should be like a poetic metaphor; it has a vehicle that captures our imagination and offers a range of meanings that may relate to our own experience.
• Art should carry us away, not represent.
• Art should not be so much about what the author feels; it should be more like a spark for the observer.
• Art should open up passageways into a wider view of our world.
• Art, drama, music and eroticism can all be compensations for the routine-ness of our everyday life.
• Beauty is like a magnet for our own unsatisfied needs; it is not a quality of things ‘out there’.
• By denying yourself pleasure you simply pile up your desires like water in a dam.
• Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
• In our aesthetic responses to art, we are temporarily released from the anguish of our pent-up desires.
• In the poets we catch some glimpse of the heaven in which they live.
• Suggestiveness and concealed implication is more beautiful than a totally open show.
• Tastes are not physical attributes; they only mean something to us internally. We can’t reliably report them on a scale.
• The enemies of aura and charisma are routine and impersonality.
• The tyrants or the mob can kill the poet or a prophet, but never the poem or message.
• We all naturally like to go beyond our humdrum worldly existence. We like visions, decorated tiles, stained glass and firework displays.
• We are prone to display naïve confusion of aesthetics with utility.
• When we are in a mood of aesthetic appreciation, without conscious perception or reflection, we see pictorial qualities rather than the objects that are depicted; and we hear tonal qualities rather than players and instruments making sounds.

Ardua, coping with troubles

• A crisis concentrates the mind.
• A rich merchant might accept a big loss and yet learn a lesson from the experience. But most people cannot afford to do this.
• All of us, including both our friends and our enemies, are swimming together in the same stormy sea.
• Anxiety comes from being pre-occupied with the worst, instead of being prepared for it.
• Fulfilment is not to be resolved by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good.
• If rivers had never flooded, our valleys would be less fertile.
• If we can remove or reduce the desire, we can lose or ease the frustration.
• Insecurity is the very mark of our humanity - so we should expect to live with it.
• It is our will’s blind strivings that are the reason why life consists of so much suffering.
• Jolts of discomfort, pain, anxiety, outrage or offence have served no purpose if we cannot manage things better the next time.
• Life is all ups and downs; neither joy nor sorrow is ‘better’. Joy and sorrow are inseparable (and accentuate each other).
• Most of us, fearing the pain involved, attempt to avoid problems. This is not wise; those things that hurt, instruct.
• Only he who swims against the tide reaches the source.
• Our greatest glory does not lie in never falling, but in getting up every time we do fall.
• Our life will always be a rough ocean, however bigger our ships and better our technology.
• Our world contains blind, dark, undomesticated forces of nature that menace our bodies with earthquakes, fires, droughts and floods.
• People over-rate their fear of being ridiculed, even by inanimate objects. We have a tendency to think that the world is out to get us.
• Problems are the cutting edge that distinguishes between success and failure.
• Regret following a disaster can cause us to lose our straight thinking.
• There is a wide gap between a careful assessment of various risks and the popular perception of those risks.
• We all need to have a good fusion of ideals and grit (or fortitude).
• We can interpret our annoyance in two ways: either someone is deliberately doing something to annoy us, or, we are simply annoyed by whatever is happening.
• We must accept whatever life throws at us with calmness and courage, and limit our wants to achievable things; passion makes us irrational.
• We must learn to suffer whatever we cannot avoid.
• We should not let isolated traumatic events overshadow our lives; we should learn to adapt to stress, so that we can live through the disasters that are yet to befall us.
• What makes life fulfilling is how well we have met our anxieties, injustices and feelings of envy.
• What we call misfortune comes from having the wrong ideas about life; whatever happens is just part of the normal way of the world; and we need to train our emotions to cope.
• When there were earthquakes and floods, people knew they should leave their homes, but delayed because of emotion, and some perished. It’s similar with the old beliefs in magic and the gods; they are no longer good enough to enable us to survive in a world of trade with other countries.

Civilization and Culture

• A civilization will start to drift into a dark age when it thinks it knows all the answers.
• A culture that fails to satisfy the majority of its participants has no chance of lasting for any length of time, nor does it deserve one.
• A fundamental leap in human culture came when we started telling stories about humans that did not depend on magic and divine interference.
• A group, a society, a nation - even the whole human race - is still a number of human individuals, any of whom may be living good lives.
• Any society should allow room for scepticism; it’s impossible to stop all people from feeling sceptical.
• By studying other cultures we may learn different possibilities of making sense of human life as a whole.
• Civilization is like walking up a scree slope; one can slide backwards as easily as climb upwards. Getting a good foothold is essential. Memory and writing help to prevent a civilization sliding backwards.
• Clarifying the differences between opposing cultures is only an interim goal. The real task is to unravel each culture and weave the threads into something better and with wider appeal.
• Cross pollination of cultures is fruitful and inescapable.
• Culture and civilization are just two sides of the same thing.
• Every city or village should have a public space for casual, spontaneous dialogue. Next to a market is ideal.
• Every culture gives itself the right to look down on the others; but it is foolish if it looks down for long.
• Getting experts from different specialties together seems the best route to making progress in the grey areas between science and society.
• Greed, and not contributing fairly, can lead to the ruin of a whole society.
• Human progress is never quelled for long. Some people will always be looking for a better way of doing or thinking, and a few of these will find one.
• Humanity should be thought of as a collective experiment in living, with each doing her or his part to fashion the world as it should be.
• I can see no point in going back to a dark age.
• If all citizens spend all their time seeking the greatest pleasure, the city’s economy is sure to collapse.
• If altruistic individuals can find each other and work together, and if they can identify selfish individuals and exclude them, then the altruists will be able to reap the benefits of co-operation that are unavailable to the purely selfish.
• If enough people feel a sufficiently powerful sense of grievance, then sooner or later the lid will blow; sometimes the effect will be beneficial and sometimes it will be disastrous.
• It is only too often claimed that inequality is willed by God, and that we must not be tolerant with those who do not agree with our interpretation of God’s will. Such a claim leads to a sick society.
• It is too idealistic to assume a basic unity between human beings. We will always have competition, clashes of need, clashes of character, and urges to self-expression.
• I often wonder why so many people are so easily swayed by stories presented with elaborate appeal but which have little accuracy or value.
• Life in a society is much like trading. A man’s worth is what he can bring to the deal, and what he can actually deliver.
• Most of us are loath to speak up against injustice when we see it, especially when we personally are not the ones being targeted.
• No concept of society should be used to justify the persecution of even a single one of its citizens.
• Restraint, justified by common consent or laws, is not the same as violence, and should not be regarded as an excuse for violence on the part of those restrained.
• Societies that profess a common core of stories and morality last much longer than those that do not.
• Society should learn more from the Games; some rules are needed, but also fair play and sportsmanship.
• Stability and maturity in a civilization cannot be achieved when most of the population is unaware of the extent to which they are being manipulated by their leaders.
• The end of social life is to fuse the divergent stances of standing-up and standing-back into a wholesome stance of standing-for.
• The fact of progress is written plain and large on the page of history, but progress is not a law of nature. The ground gained by one generation can be lost by the next.
• The trigger to civilization was not just knowledge of good and evil; it was better understanding of how the world works, and understanding of what it takes to live in societies, both in cooperation and competition.
• There is enough suffering in the world; civilization should not make it worse by creating more.
• There is grave danger when the desire for group unanimity overrides members’ ability to make rational decisions.
• Trained citizens can do more with the resources that are available than a mass of untrained slaves can.
• We citizens are supposed to act as if we believed the fictions of our culture; but those fictions are usually only what the rulers try to maintain, in order to keep us under their control.

Communication

• Denial of truth can sometimes be justified if it is the only way to bring optimism and motivation.
• Dialogue is when you assume that people have different views; otherwise it is discussion, or conversation.
• Don’t ask questions unless you are genuinely interested in the other’s response.
• Gossip does not make it clear what is information and what is disinformation; idle talk is chatter without direction; at best these can only be part of relaxation.
• If one always speaks one’s mind, one should not be surprised to be regarded as hostile or a threat.
• In many stories, the importance of the self, of its emotional life and its self-expression is romantically exaggerated, and with it, the tension between the personality and some groups. We come to regard the groups as more important than the individuals in them, which does not help build good personal relations.
• In much of our talking, our thinking is left behind.
• It seems that idle words outnumber those dictated by reason, charity or necessity.
• Recollection does not simply describe; it also tends to dramatize, and to insert new value into events.
• Smart opportunists will always find ways of out-smarting newly educated citizens.
• Some sages and writers make a point of being obscure; sometimes this provokes the readers’ imagination, but more often it just remains obscure.
• Sometimes it’s better to think of nonsense in order to get past the limitations of what one thinks is sense.
• To make ordinary conversation possible, we have to agree to accept certain meanings – at least for the time being.
• We can easily be carried away by rhetoric and fine words.
• We should use more two-way dialogue and less one-way rhetoric.
• We tell stories with all sorts of motives in mind other than to communicate the content of the story; for example to curry favour, to amuse, to impress, to shock, and to deceive.
• When someone says something to you that you are not sure how to take, try asking a question in return that implies that there is a different way of looking at the issue.
• Writers and speakers, justifiably or otherwise, have to make the commonsense assumption that the readers or listeners they are addressing live in the same world as they do, and that their minds will work similarly.
• Writers easily fall into the habit of writing abstrusely. Even if the author did not intend it, opportunists can use abstruse writings to bamboozle ordinary readers, who may struggle through a dense jungle of words.

Death

• Awareness of our mortality is a spur to living a good life.
• Death sharpens our eye for details about the well-lived life.
• Death, the last enemy, is the runner that is just behind us.
• No-one can witness his or her own funeral.
• Not believing in immortality does not mean one should be afraid of death. People who lived before religion did not have to concern themselves over such ideas; they just followed their self-preservation instincts.
• Our life is a brief passing shadow that returns no more.
• Our life is no more endless than the visual field is without limit; death is not lived through.
• The people who are distressed by a death are the dependants and friends; unless the death is of an oppressor or scoundrel, in which case people may rejoice. It is not so distressing to the person doing the dying.
• The wisdom and reasoning in the world at least helps teach us not to be afraid to die.
• Unadventurous people that fail to live life to the full because they fear death, still die. They die, however, never having really lived.
• We find it difficult to believe that death is a final end to our selves.
• What should we do before we enter the deep void?
• While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve spirits of the dead? While you do not know life, how can you know about death?

Decision-making

• Although we do not have power over many events, it is always up to us to determine how we will react to them.
• Conscious thinking is a good friend when a decision can be made on a few criteria; but intuition may be a better friend when things get more complicated, even when the decisions are big ones.
• Forecasting the longer-term consequences, and the knock-on or downstream effects of our actions is difficult, but we ought to try.
• He who will not economize will have to agonize.
• If a deal is felt to be too unfair, one side may decide to cut its own gains to spite the other greedy party’s gains.
• If we have too many choices, our values become confused and we can become paralysed in our ability to decide.
• If we knew what might upset our plans tomorrow, we would just make a different set of mistakes.
• Interventions often fail because the environment responds by compensating for the imposed disturbances; and in ways that are determined by its own structure, and that do not reflect the intentions of the intervener.
• It is not easy to work out whether our gut feelings are really pointing to good reasons.
• It is too simplistic just to say “we have a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’”; that implies a diagnosis that is usually too constrained by our existing theories and prejudices.
• Judgment is not necessarily articulate, or for that matter conscious; animals make judgments.
• Our beliefs ought to accord with the evidence, but where the right decision is unclear, we should choose the alternative with the better consequences.
• Since we do not know in advance what the precise consequences of our actions is going to be, it is dangerous to use the argument that the ends justify the means.
• Some risk taking is good; but if things go wrong, it is often the ordinary citizen, who had no say in the decision, who bears most of the risks, like dying in a war, or being taxed.
• The brain races ahead of consciousness in arriving at a choice.
• The doctor has to decide in good time whether to try to kill the germ or let the germ kill the patient.
• We would all be wise to mind the gap between well-judged decisions in controlled situations and managing instinctively in the real world.
• When we make decisions, we often give more weight to the possible regret should the decision turn out to be a bad one, rather than to the benefit should it turn out well.
• When weighing up what to do, we should try reflecting from the viewpoint of an impartial spectator.

Education

• A good teacher needs to create in students the links that short-cut their immature natural reactions.
• A teacher has created some meaning when he gets some intelligent questions.
• A teacher’s job is to spark the goal-seeking of each individual student.
• Education should be rooted in responsible philosophy, not blind authority.
• Good aims for education are: a) to allow us to realize how little we do really know; b) to escape from our prejudices; c) to learn how to make up our minds; d) to learn to show insight; e) to be ready to learn, not simply to be ‘trained’ to become ‘wise’ or ‘initiated’.
• If a teacher is wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
• In all the nations I know about, many individuals – not just children – are not yet able to grasp moral issues and rational consequences. So this is where education needs to start.
• Learning by heart works with some people better than with others; it is best to have other methods as well.
• Liberal education
  1. leads to better emotional and social maturity;
  2. raises citizens to exercise their democratic rights well;
  3. provides a defence against cults, propaganda, nonsense and the big lies of charismatic demagogues;
  4. provides a weapon against relativism;
  5. avoids delegating personal responsibility to someone else outside.
• Many educators say that education is all about building character. But thinking carefully, and reflecting about moral issues, should be included among the character traits being instilled.
• Many teachers treat teaching like a war. They corner the learner and leave no way out. But the mind of the learner is working away from you, just like the mind of an enemy commander.
• Most humans are stuck in their ways by age 25. Their next chance to move forward is after they retire.
• No nation needs an education system that produces people with skills to lead us in exactly the direction we don’t want to go.
• Our intellectual, as well as our ethical education is corrupt. It is perverted by the admiration of brilliance, of the way things are said; we are educated to act with an eye to the gallery.
• People learn through seeing, through hearing, through doing and through thinking it out for themselves. Each learner has a different balance of these abilities.
• State control of education is liable to produce dogmatic self-satisfaction and massive intellectual complacency, instead of critical dissatisfaction and eagerness for improvement.
• Teachers need to practice self-criticism themselves; this is the best way to pass on this good habit.
• Teachers ought to aim to get a reaction from learners; but purely verbal reactions are insufficient; there should be action, using notebooks, diagrams, maps or other artefacts; and the teacher should give feedback.
• Teachers should sow a seed in their students’ minds, so that they themselves think of the positive idea; they should not try to force it down their throat. Using a story helps do this.
• Too many schools teach obedience within worldviews, far more than inquiry across them.
• Two schools can have the same clear rules and general moral code, but one allows students to discuss the rules, whereas in the other discussion and questioning is not allowed. The former is to be preferred.
• What hope have we of emancipating human beings from willed immaturity?

Emotion

• An absence of emotional ‘buy in’ may cause even the best plan we propose to grind to a halt.
• An emotional reaction is a valuable process by which we can determine the meaning of a happening.
• Anger affects the emotions more widely than joy.
• Beware people who feign emotion as a device to bypass our better judgment.
• Emotion and cognition should be viewed as ‘partners in the mind’.
• Emotion can both inform and deform moral judgment.
• Emotion is like a runaway horse - we are just the unfortunate riders.
• Emotional ‘shows’ may be a good early warning that something needs fixing. One needs to have emotion oneself to recognize such things.
• Failing to appreciate other people’s emotions and hurts may bring problems on our own heads.
• Fear cannot be got rid of by personal effort, but only by absorption in a cause greater than one’s own interests.
• Human communication is more than an exchange of symbols and ideas; people make emotional as well as cognitive appeals to each other.
• If we can’t regulate our emotions, we are risking stress and bad health.
• Other people are co-conspirators in the cultivation of our emotions.
• Our investment in our existing emotional dispositions is sometimes stronger than our attachment to rationality, and often more powerful than our ability to change; our emotional attachments can generate reasons for our beliefs rather than vice versa.
• Our minds flinch from looking at considerations hostile to our reigning mood of feeling.
• Our world has been changing dramatically, but our emotional sides have not kept pace.
• The energy of a person participating in a discussion rises and falls with the emotional feedback received.
• The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.
• The seat of fear is in your heart, and not in the hand of the feared.
• We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce.
• We need only consider how small is the number of people who are capable of argument to realize that the majority will always have to be tackled by an appeal to their emotions and passions rather than an appeal to their reason.
• We need to recognize moments when emotion is giving us a push in the wrong direction.
• We often respond to a situation through emotion, but rationalize afterwards.
• When anger rises, think of the consequences.

Everyday Living

• A dog on a rope tied to a moving cart soon learns to go with the pull of the rope. Humans have more advanced reason, so they should learn to ride the waves of good and bad fortune, and not ‘kick against the pricks’.
• A human can act at any of three levels; the brainy ape, the ordinary busy but unthinking citizen, and the amateur philosopher.
• Beware the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters your house as a guest, then becomes a host, and then a master. Don’t let your possessions take you over.
• Ceaseless competition puts everyone on an endless maddening treadmill.
• Dangerously optimistic notions, about what the world and other people are like, are sure to make us disappointed or angry.
• Discouragement serves no possible purpose.
• Each of us is at times a battlefield, upon which our reason and our judgment wage war against our passion and our appetite. We have to be the peacemaker.
• Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to.
• Extreme asceticism is based on unconditional hatred of the world.
• Hold your own thoughts and judgments lightly.
• If a man takes no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at hand.
• If things go well for us, it is folly to congratulate or praise ourselves, or to think that our ideas or our religion must be correct. If things go badly, we are not necessarily at fault.
• If we over-emphasize the need to be humble, we may be discouraged from resolving to address our problems boldly.
• If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.
• Ignorance of self is a vice.
• In our everyday actions, we rely on there being order to things.
• In the long run, moral and fair people do better than the cheats or freeloaders.
• It is dangerous to pretend that things happen by necessity alone and not at least partly accidentally.
• It is fatal to mistake means for ends.
• It is just as bad to incorrectly accept things as inevitable as it is to wish for the impossible.
• It is not good to spend too much time being ashamed of our mistakes.
• Judgment and appetite are like “two loved guests in your house”. It doesn’t do to favour one over the other.
• Just being more and more clever, and more and more systematic, will not make all problems go away.
• Many people are desperately seeking ‘something else’, possibly because they would like to offload some of the responsibility for the way we are fouling up this beautiful world of ours.
• Misconception is a normal feature of everyday life.
• Neither optimism nor pessimism does much harm in small doses.
• Nothing satisfies the person who is not satisfied with a little.
• Only a fool would be upset by change.
• Our clothes conceal much of our beauty, but they do not hide our unbeautiful aspects.
• People care about processes as well as about outcomes.
• Perfect justice, so that good gets rewarded and evil gets punished, is not to be relied on.
• Possessions are simply things that we keep and guard in case we may need them another day.
• Practical use-value is not the same as motivation-value.
• The best people are modest in their speech, but exceed in their actions.
• The spectator, not the actor, holds the clue to the meaning of human affairs.
• To cultivate humility is tantamount to cultivating hypocrisy.
• Virtue is a will in agreement with nature.
• We can ‘do without’ most of the things we do not currently have; we should be satisfied with whatever is left for us, and with how things have turned out.
• We cannot hope to change the underlying disposition that makes us partial to some things and not to others.
• We create our standards by proposing, discussing and adopting them.
• We favour the near-at-hand over things distant or beyond our concern.
• We ought always to keep in the back of our mind the possibility of disaster.
• We should get rid of our cravings and anger, and obsession with particular goals; we should then let thought for others take up the empty mind space.
• We should listen to our own voice rather than that of the crowd.
• Wealth is neither essential nor a crime.
• Whatever we are holding ourselves available for, it cannot be the dawning of a secure certainty.

Evil

• A small number of selfish individuals can sabotage a society of fair players.
• Appeals to prejudice need an ‘other’ to be prejudiced against.
• Evil can be violently coached; even mild people can be turned into monsters.
• Evil is the cruelty that can arise out of the competitiveness in the game of life.
• Evil is often more a matter of naïvety than of malevolence.
• Evil shrieks loudly, while goodness clothes the world in silence.
• Hatred is like an acid that burns the container that holds it more than it damages the surface it spills on.
• Many horrors inflicted on humanity have been inspired by one group of people thinking that they had all the answers and the rest were wrong, and that this justified oppressing them.
• Much of the evil we see is people being unable to control their animal instincts.
• No independent spirits are needed to account for human sin. The devils within us are our own selves.
• People aren’t evil for the sake of it; they don’t serve some evil spirit. They are in thrall to their destructive emotions. And whatever their problem is, we don’t like their way out of their hang-ups.
• People who insist that they are always right, who insist on winning every argument, who insist that they are never to blame, end up playing on their own.
• The essence of crime is the feeling of superiority to convention; we all sometimes believe, or persuade ourselves, that good behaviour is a mere fiction or convention; and we represent ourselves as rebels and martyrs for a noble cause.
• The guilty is sometimes the victim of the injured party.
• The human race has a long and proud history of meekly engaging in depraved acts of inhumanity on the basis of ideas that, on closer examination, have turned out to be total gibberish.
• The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.
• The sources of our prejudice are hidden from our consciousness; our memory may be distorted by our prejudices; and prejudices may cause us to suppress unwelcome facts.
• There may be a kind of momentary kingdom of evil, when the same spirit seizes upon a large number of people and they do in a crowd things which no man would do by himself.
• To blame an evil spirit for the bad things you do is an attempt to deny responsibility, like a habitual drunkard blaming the drink, or an violent person blaming his own feelings of anger.
• We all carry an evil shadow around with us.
• We are disinclined to believe in anything evil, through blind conviction of the perfection of our civilization.
• We may well ask “why does evil so often triumph?”
• While anyone can persuade evil people to do evil things, only religion can persuade good people to do evil things.

Existential Attitude

• A formal theory of logic can be proposed, but a formal theory of existence, answering questions like “why is there anything, rather than nothing?”, cannot. This fact can provoke anxiety in us.
• Each of us has to understand our local situation in the world, before we hypothesize about the universal condition of the world’s total content.
• Every other creature on the planet seems to be equally committed to a meaningless existence, so why do we expect any better?
• Faith is an affirmation of meaning of our life, or of existence as a whole, in the teeth of ultimate meaninglessness.
• Human existence is as if we have been made to ride a powerful horse, over which we have some but not total control. The ‘horse’ seems to be subject to other forces, including other horses and animals.
• If the human race had never existed, most of the world would still be there regardless.
• If we are going to make the world better, we should start off with our own heart, head and hands.
• Incessant discontent plunges ahead of itself, and can mark the lives of those who follow us.
• It doesn’t make sense to question the real world – that’s what we all inhabit.
• It is folly to think that we can take a ‘detached’ view of the situations we are involved in. We cannot look at our own lives as if from a distance.
• Memory is our key to personal identity; it supplies us with a sense that our lives are continuous, that we have a stream of consciousness interrupted only by sleep.
• Our life history constitutes a drama in which we are the leading character.
• Our natural state is to feel lost in the world; perception is our way of finding ourselves.
• Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation?
• Some people can face the thought that the world is a place where events occur at random; but others cannot, and prefer to think that everything has a purpose.
• Stoicism is valuable at times, but can descend into apathy.
• The general strategy of our species is to achieve personal wholeness and social coherence.
• The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity.
• The world transcends us; it has a solidity with which we must learn to come to terms.
• The world we inhabit is not particularly interested in us, so we must diminish its power to make us suffer by controlling the emotions it excites in us.
• There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (a God, or a tyrant, or a philosophical school) has a responsibility to give our life meaning.
• There’s a difference between the ‘I’ as the subject of what I perceive and reflect, and the ‘I’ that the first I sees as part of the observed world.
• Unlike beasts, men do not merely live but also have a conception of life.
• We emerge or become; we make of ourselves what we will be.
• We have moments of being aware of an abyss, an anxiety in which we feel lost in facing the world we find ourselves in.
• We should all get a grip on life and stop making excuses. We are all at least partly responsible for what happens.
• We should distinguish ourselves from animals not by saying “we can know and they can merely feel” but “we can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they can”.
• What is the meaning of life? One answer might be that we accomplish things, we plan and sometimes achieve; another answer is pleasure and happiness; a third answer is that we are approved of by an external superpower, or God; but the best answer is that we have existential courage, we take pride in living a good life regardless.
• With normal concern, participation and hope, the facts of everyday life do not seem arbitrary and surprising.

Families

• In marriage it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union.
• Married couples should keep some spaces in their togetherness.
• The family that reflects together develops for the best.
• The trouble with the close affection of couples is not its intensity, but its exclusions and jealousies.
• You may strive to be like your children, but don’t try to make them the same as you.

Folly

• A partiality to inspiring nonsense is not confined to the lower classes.
• Against the madness of crowds, the very gods themselves contend in vain.
• We are always liable to be undone by our own folly, and our delusions of grandeur.

Freedom

• A person cannot be free by conforming to a rule book.
• Each person should have the right to the most extensive basic liberty, but it must be a liberty compatible with a like liberty for all.
• Even the strongest believers in predetermined fate act as if there is free will. They still intervene by mitigating risks.
• Free acts are the exceptions; most of our acts are taken care of by habits, just as many of our everyday judgments are taken care of by prejudices.
• Freedom is never absolute; it is constrained inside a social space not of our own making or choosing, such as existing culture, government and laws.
• Individual freedoms are interdependent; to will oneself free is also to will others free. Freedom is a joint project.
• Man must believe in free will to hold himself and other people responsible for their actions.
• Most ordinary people lack any real personal freedom, because they have allowed others to decide how they themselves should live.
• There is more to be gained by espousing free will than determinism.
• We can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a constraint, and when we stop talking about freedom as a goal and a fulfilment.
• When people demand freedom, the first questions are “Freedom from what?” and “Freedom to do what?”

Government and Institutions

• A key challenge for any State is selecting its future leaders.
• An individual has no good reason to fight other people who think differently. But institutions not only fight rivals, they suppress their own people.
• A successful nation or city may be able to unite religion, authority and tradition; but these are all subject to change, so the critical factor is how to evolve.
• Authoritarians say that the few sages who can reflect on things should keep their thoughts to themselves, because the masses cannot cope with diverse ideas. Authoritarians want the masses to stick to a standard set of stories. But society would be much stronger if more people could become like sages.
• Belief in a political utopia leads to a dangerous dogmatic attachment, because once many sacrifices have already been made for it, it is almost impossible for a leader to admit that these were all in vain.
• Conscience is something that individuals have, but groups or nations do not. Beware the leaders who hide behind the anonymity of a conscience-less group.
• Democracy should not mean the rule of the mass uneducated.
• Even after a plague or other disaster, some people may emerge better off than before. Surviving merchants may have money to invest, and surviving workers can sell their labour.
• Government excites a lust for power that is subject to emotional drives, to narcissism, fantasies of omniscience and other sources of folly.
• Governments like to maintain the myth that they are infallible.
• How a nation manages to change its governments is more critical than what government it actually has.
• If a social structure is one of submission to authority, whether overt authority or the anonymous authority of the market and public opinion, it is not a mature one.
• How can we so order political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?
• In an institution or society, every reorganization or major change runs the risk of destroying channels of cooperation and trust.
• In many cities and nations, it’s effectively one drachma, one vote – not one person one vote.
• It is a fallacy to imagine that a great unity exists between human beings. Competition, opportunism, bullying – and each person’s belief that they alone are thinking right – are inevitable.
• It is often difficult to distinguish oppression from justified restraint.
• It is pointless to address political unwisdom by trying to educate the governing class; it’s better to concentrate on educating the public.
• Most rulers fail because they promise what they can’t deliver. Why do they promise it? Usually, to outbid rival leaders for our followership.
• One cannot change the multiple facets of human nature by simply changing the economic circumstances.
• Power of arms is not enough on its own; it needs human soldiers to be prepared to kill.
• Subordinating all society to economics falls short on many counts, mostly to do with human values.
• The best government for a nation in peace may not be the best when it is at war, or in a crisis, or in a time of major change, or when many groups are at loggerheads.
• The loyal opposition is the most loyal of all groups in a State.
• The majority may sometimes decide that they actually want a tyrant.
• The morality of a State (if indeed it has any) tends to be considerably lower than that of the average citizen.
• The more power we give to our public officials, the more mistakes and abuses will creep in.
• There are always some wise men who speak on public affairs, but it is the fools that decide the policies.
• Things were never the same once our cities grew, we sailed the seas and engaged in commerce, founded colonies and daughter cities, and, eventually, used money.
• Tyrants claim that a nation is a rabble led by an elite. While there will probably always be an underclass, prosperity and stability are better when more people form a middle class.
• Usurers may be a necessary profession, but don’t let them dictate policy.
• Waging war on passion is a total waste of time.
• Warlike nations and cities require a constant supply of threats and villains - sometimes these are real, but often they are exaggerated or simply invented.
• We ought to insure against society being taken over by an aggressive, pushy, active minority that thinks it has all the answers.

Happiness

• All events are either happy or character-developing.
• Happiness comes from being social in company; trusting each other; keeping the familiar and what we have; feeling a sense of being valued.
• If we are not careful, we find we need more and more of our positive experiences just to maintain our current happiness level.
• It’s a dismal philosophy to say we can only be happy as a by-product of what other people do; it should come, at least in part, from within us.
• Keeping happy depends on being adaptable; recognizing the diminishing happiness returns of having more and more; and seeing that the inner life matters as much as outer circumstances.
• More anxiety comes from striving to do well for oneself than from trying to do good for others.
• Most of us rely on one fantasy or another to remain happy.
• Nothing satisfies the person who is not satisfied with a little.
• People who care about other people are on average happier than those who are more preoccupied with themselves.
• People will not be happy ‘lotus-eating’ for long - everyone needs to be stretched to thrive.
• Personal happiness is the overall motivational device for most people.
• The key is to happiness in our lives is grateful acceptance, not cringing mendicancy to some superpower.
• The same amount of money gained or lost matters less to a rich person than a poor one.
• The value of money is limited to whatever it enables you to do with it.
• The world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy.
• Those who want to be consistently happy – or wise – are the ones that must most often change.
• We can spend too much time living in the future. Life is not a dress rehearsal, or a test.
• We cannot be happy without setting ourselves goals. But if our goals are too low, we get bored; if they are too high, we get frustrated; both can cause depression.
• We cannot simply seek happiness; we need to actually do something specific to achieve it.
• What being happy means is being in agreement with the world.

History

• All the history which exists, our history of the Great and the Powerful, is at best a shallow comedy; it is what one of our worst instincts, the idolatrous worship of power and success, has led us to believe to be real.
• History concentrates only on leaders, heroes and memorable events.
• History has often been written under the supervision of the emperors, the generals and the dictators, usually to justify themselves to posterity.
• History is never free of value judgments.
• In spite of its biases, subservience to rulers and other failings, we are unwise if we do not try to learn from history, even if we only learn probabilities.
• Study the past if you would define the future.
• There can be no history of the past as it exactly happened.

Knowledge

• Abandonment of beliefs, once we have found them to be flawed, incoherent or self-contradictory, is an important part of human intellectual advance.
• Brute facts are those that are independent of any human institutions. The rest are inventions of those institutions; even language is an invention of human societies.
• Certainty has more to do with people and their belief systems than with any given set of facts.
• Common sense is a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of 18.
• Curiosity is fascination with knowing but indifference as to its meaning.
• Dialectic does not necessarily lead to reliable knowledge. For any one thesis, there are many possible antitheses, and even more possible syntheses.
• Ignorance is the night of the mind, but a night without moon and star.
• It is better to think about how something can be proved to be untrue than how something can be proved to be true.
• It’s an old urge to think that truth and reality should coincide - though there is a relationship between them.
• Just because something can’t be proven, it doesn’t mean that “it’s true” and “it’s false” are equally likely. Probability, credibility, and reasonable arguments all count for something.
• Knowledge should never be independent of its role in solving problems or giving helpful explanations.
• Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
• Logic is one of those natural regularities in the world that we are best off going along with.
• Logic on its own is empty of content.
• One reason humans have made progress as a species is that we have created general theories, models, stories and structures - which save us re-thinking things out on every occasion.
• People are often more attached to being right than to solving the problem.
• Science doesn’t add new certainties, but it is still better to rely on the scientists’ stories than on fairy tales.
• Technology should transform nature into a reservoir of resources.
• The basic principle of logic is the principle of non-contradiction.
• The death of dogma is the birth of reality.
• The idea that the truth is always somewhere in the middle between two rival stories is a fallacy. It can be used as a bargaining tactic by extremists.
• The more adequate our stock of ideas and the relationships between them are, the more able we will be to cope with the challenges and emergencies we face.
• The pencil is mightier than the pen.
• The scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
• The world is not already there waiting for us to reflect on it. It just seems like that.
• The world is too complicated to extrapolate in a straight line from the past to the future.
• Theories are not representations of the world at all; they are a way of world-making, of constructing ‘a’ world, not ‘the’ world.
• There is hardly a more powerful and universal human desire than to try to make sense of the world.
• Through reasoned discussion we can actually assure each other that we belong to a common world.
• To do science, we have to rise above our local situation as the context of relevance. Theories and knowledge then become shared, but impersonal, reflections.
• We can only reliably test a theory if we can look harder for counter-examples than for supporting evidence.
• We don’t accurately re-create the same feeling and reasoning at the time of recollection as we did at the time that a certain event happened.
• We don’t build our knowledge of the world from our inner experience outwards. We learn it from others.
• We should encourage a marketplace of ideas.
• We should not seek the absolute truth, but the highest quality explanation of things.
• What is word knowledge but a shadow of wordless knowledge?
• What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by social consensus, repeatable experiments, and statistical analysis.

Language and Metaphor

• As far as the mass of ordinary readers and listeners are concerned, it matters less how ‘real’ or ‘accurate’ a story or definition is; it’s more how ‘persuasive’ or ‘attractive’ the meanings are.
• A theory or model, and a metaphor or story, can complement each other in giving meaning to our experiences and observations.
• Even scientists can tamper with their stories to improve their effect.
• If we cannot clearly define what we mean by some words, that doesn’t mean we should act as if they do not matter.
• In all the languages I know, there is a word ‘is’ that has at least two different meanings.
• Language is a major cause of separateness.
• Metaphors 1) help reveal thoughts that are hidden, barely conscious or difficult to articulate; 2) enable researchers to see beyond their existing models; 3) help convey meaning to readers of texts. But they are often too imprecise, drifting, or subjective. They are neither theories nor knowledge.
• Metaphors reveal the instability of meaning in language.
• Poetic metaphors consist of ‘tenor’ (the intended meaning) and ‘vehicle’ (the words actually used). This involves two relationships: firstly between the tenor and the metaphor’s vehicle, and secondly between the vehicle and our own experience with which the vehicle strikes a chord.
• Pure theory, like fantasy, violates the rules of reality for the convenience of the story.
• Reading is an act of collaboration between the reader and the author.
• Reality is not reflected by our language but produced by it; language gives us a particular way of ‘carving up’ the world.
• Small talk encourages mannered circumlocutions and ‘forked tongue’ speech.
• Stories can both create and destroy meaning.
• Talk both enables and constrains action; the latter because too many alternative interpretations can lead to stalemate.
• There is a ‘subtext’ beneath most conscious discourse, and a speaker or writer is not able to control this subtext by what he or she conceals or reveals.
• There is no single sacred language, no unique tongue in which the Good is communicated. If it can’t be translated into everyone’s language, it isn’t worth much.
• We act as though we are the shaper and master of language, but language really speaks through us.
• We as speakers of a language have already – usually unconsciously – incorporated into our language an interpretation of what we think is really important.

Laws and Punishment

• Even in an ideal society, there will always be ratbags, pushy types, shy types, generous souls – and people who fail.
• If laws prohibit too many things, it will discourage the good as well as the evil.
• In punishment, first warn; then limit privileges; then restrain. In all cases, require offenders to pay for any damage and recompense any victims.
• Most punishment only fortifies the alienation of the offender.
• No nation should continue with the same laws and traditions indefinitely.
• Society should be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his mundane everyday existence.
• The fact that all men are not equal does not justify inequality before the law.
• We can get pleasure from punishing cheaters; often more than by restraining ourselves from cheating.

Leaders

• A good leader is like a shepherd; he stays behind his flock; the nimblest sheep go on ahead and the others follow. They do not realize that they are being driven from behind, unless they are aware of a sheepdog.
• Even a benevolent ruler can impose authority by censorship, rhetoric, repetitive propaganda, encouraging social pressure to conform, spreading confusion and fear of outsiders, and appeals to tribalism.
• In a council, the leader may need to throw in a few threats aimed at people who are simply fighting for their personal share of the pie.
• It is all too easy for powerful rulers to enforce their authority, not just by reward and punishment, but by instilling fear; that fear may be of exile, isolation, persecution, cruelty, torture or execution.
• Leaders can make use of a daily diet of iconic imagery, ‘them-and-us’ thinking, peer pressure, social stigma and scaremongering to manipulate citizens whose capacity for critical reflection are pretty weak.
• Men seek power over others - only to lose it over themselves.
• Leaders often delude themselves that everything is going along smoothly, when in fact they are on a knife-edge of descent into violent upheaval. But in doing this, they fail to fool many of their followers.
• Leaders sometimes try to define the reality of others.
• One of the best antidotes to fear-mongering leaders is laughter. It helps make them more accountable.
• Ordinary people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it.
• Power gets angry when it is under threat.
• Saints are people who challenge those humans who have become heartless instruments of domination, by force, of others.
• Some leaders just emerge, just as nations can drift into wars without any clear trigger.
• The idea of most politicians is to short-circuit reason and appeal to subconscious biases.
• The more pomp and ceremony we see, the more we suspect that leaders are worried about maintaining their power.
• The tyrant takes the view that the tenets of religion, although not true, are a most expedient and indispensable political device.
• We assume that our leader knows what is best, and gives orders accordingly. We may have to obey, but we can still think he is mistaken.
• When we see men of worth, we should think of equalling them; when we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
• You can’t actually bully someone into believing - just into pretending to believe.

Love

• Giving love expects nothing in return – it is not like trading.
• If all you want is “love’s peace and love’s pleasure”, then you are better off not trying for it.
• Individuals acting ‘properly’ act in an impersonal manner, without hate and therefore without love.
• It is more important to relieve suffering than to generate extreme happiness.
• It is the Spirit of Good which has swept the world ever since it came into being.
• It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding of a need.
• Love begins when a person feels another person’s needs to be as important as his or her own.
• Love cannot compel, so is a thing of perfect freedom.
• Love has to include care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.
• Love is an activity, not a feeling.
• Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, does love begin to unfold.
• When love beckons to you, follow, although the way may be hard and steep.
• When we offer ourselves to others, we experience no diminution of our selfhood; we become an expander of the spirit of love; we do not seek a personal payoff.

Meaning

• Humanity seems incapable of refraining from imposing meanings and purposes on the world; often, it does this by simply naming and categorizing things.
• It is in the process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning.
• Meaning in history is never fixed; the truth is always yet to appear.
• Meaning is never a totally private experience, nor is it something divinely ordained; it is the product of sharing our reaction to our experiences.
• Nonsense is part of the sense-making process.
• Pursuit of meaning is not an exercise in intellectual construction, but rather a response to life’s questioning of us.
• Sense is always tenuous ... we make sense as we go along.
• The meaning of anything you say is the response you get. But the value is in the action that results, especially if it is different from what would have happened if you had not said it.
• The meaning of the past is not something fixed and final, but is something continually refigured and updated in the present.
• The problems of understanding and belief are not those of proof but those of meaning.

Morality

• Absolute moral value is an illusion. We have to work out, between ourselves, good guidelines. Those guidelines should address all five aspects of the Pentagon. Cities and nations ought to develop their laws in the same way.
• A good deed that calls itself by tender names becomes the parent of a curse.
• All moralities that are claimed as universally applicable miss the mark, and can be dangerous and destructive to the human spirit.
• A person who shows off his morality is like a criminal who wears his best clothes before a judge. He would be better off going naked.
• A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
• Beware economists and traders who ignore heart and fairness.
• Conflict may appear between different moral codes, just as it can with different rules of law; we need to be able to review and try to resolve these situations.
• Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home.
• Curses return to curse the curser.
• Defining one’s conduct by ethics is like imprisoning a song-bird in a cage.
• “Do as you would be done by” also means “don’t do as you don’t want to be done by”.
• Ethical principles should not be just ‘don'ts’; they should guide us on how to use our time and our talents.
• Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.
• Good behaviour includes sticking to commitments, possibly by deferring our own personal gratification.
• Good intentions by themselves are not enough.
• Human beings, no matter how civilized, tend to be moral sheep. We are disastrously prone to follow without question the moral lead provided by those around us. We blindly go with the flow.
• If we do not manage to follow a society’s codes of conduct most of the time, we are social and moral illiterates; we are not members of the society at all, merely resident aliens (‘metics’) in it.
• Individuals are morally responsible, so must accept the consequences, including punishment.
• Instead of asking “what is man?” we would be better asking “what sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren”.
• It is important that we do not let force, in any of its forms, turn us into people who treat others as things.
• It is not possible to conjure morality out of thin air; we need stories to guide us.
• It is wrong to think that a strict set of dos and don’ts is all that is necessary for a good life and good society.
• Judging whether a foetus is a human is not in the same category as judging whether or not our world is a sphere.
• Just because we get pleasure from doing a kind act doesn’t degrade it as selfish.
• ‘Minimize misery’ is a good general moral guideline; so are ‘cruelty is always bad’ and ‘do as you would be done by’.
• Morality, if it is to be of any use, has to recognize the pragmatic.
• Morals excite passions that produce or prevent actions; reason of itself is utterly impotent in this regard. Rules of morality, therefore, cannot be conclusions of our reason.
• Most people sign up to certain basic, fundamentally similar moral principles that limit the range of moral belief systems open to them.
• Once you get knowledge of the essences of things, you can work out for yourself what is good and bad.
• Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.
• ‘Self-interest’ is not quite the same as the vice of selfishness.
• Sympathetic and helpful guidance is usually better than enforcing strict moral rules or laws.
• The basic rule of morality is ‘do as you would be done by, with sympathy and impartiality’. This goes beyond our basic animal nature; but if we don’t follow this rule, the cancer of envy will eat up all the gains of human development.
• The existence of a wide range of moral beliefs does not mean that they are all equally valid.
• The man who in view of gain thinks of righteousness; who in the view of danger is prepared to give up his life; and who does not forget an old agreement however far back it extends - such a man may be reckoned a complete man.
• The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and its consequences.
• The state may decide what is legally right or wrong, but the law is not the same as morality.
• The value of life comes from what we do in our life - our activities and achievements.
• The worst pride is that which feigns humility.
• There are no absolute guidelines for conduct - no big questions are ever settled once and for all.
• There are no externally discoverable values or reference points to guide us towards leading a good life.
• There cannot be one set of rules for all people at all times. What is right when a person or society is in a stable peace may not be right when it has its backs to the wall.
• There is a danger when one has scientific knowledge in advance of morality.
• There is little chance of achieving total unanimity in ethics; the most we can hope for is a set of shared values, an overlapping consensus on ethical issues.
• To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.
• Travelling well is more rewarding than just arriving well; the same is true of our lives.
• Unlike technical judgments, we can’t delegate moral judgments. We should never hand over our responsibility for making moral judgments to some external authority.
• We can acknowledge that we are fallible about what is right and wrong, without accepting that everyone can be equally right.
• We must be courageous and take on the responsibility for making moral judgments.
• We ought not to deny the fact that we are inevitably halfway between being monsters and being saints.
• We ought to speak up when an action we are involved in is leading to evil, even if we have been ordered to do it.
• We should choose a path between extremes – the golden mean.
• We should promote tolerance and open-mindedness as universal virtues; the only ideas we should not tolerate are those that encourage hate and violence.
• “What is the meaning of life?” is a dumb question. A better question is “How ought I to live?” or “what should I do with my life?”

Myths and Fictions

• A myth is more than legend or fiction; although it is not knowledge, it may point to some truth.
• Fictional works can resonate with our lives and perceptions, but can be ‘truth’ only in the loosest sense.
• In drama, the audience is invited by a storyteller not so much to believe their propositions as to make-believe them.
• In the ancient sagas, gods were capricious. Then historians regarded all history as degeneration from a golden age, and showed an obsession with fate and mysteries.
• Many myths contain paradoxes and are open to multiple interpretations.
• Most of us have a taste for mystery stories.
• Most people prefer fanciful, exciting, unlikely stories to the philosophies of sages – even to ideas that they have worked out for themselves.
• The ‘Mythos’, which existed before the ‘Logos’, was once the common knowledge of the whole human species. But it soon split into many different stories.
• With many stories, the border between fiction and fact is not clear.

Nostalgia

• It is equally dangerous to dwell on ideas of an ideal past or of an ideal future.
• Nostalgia for an idyllic world before civilization is unhelpful. With what we now know, we would not enjoy life if we returned to those conditions. Humans were little more than intelligent animals.
• Nostalgia for an original paradise is misplaced – it was a time of ‘kill or be killed’.
• There is too much concern about the past and the future; we should rather appreciate the here and now.
• We like to hang on to the familiar and the nostalgic.

Other People

• A polite, chivalrous or courteous gesture costs virtually nothing and gives out a lot of good feeling.
• A world without kindness, altruism, generosity, empathy and pity would be unimaginable. It is a world most of us would not wish to inhabit.
• By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
• Honest acceptance of our own lack of self-control may be the only thing that keeps us from trying to control others.
• How is it that we so easily give up our own voice to let someone else define reality for us?
• How should we judge someone who in action is a deceiver and oppressor, yet who is also aggrieved and outraged?
• How should we judge someone who though honest in the flesh yet is a thief in spirit?
• How should we judge someone whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?
• If we reach out to others too much, we risk becoming a busybody and a pain to others who don’t want us intruding.
• If we are thinking of taking revenge, we should expect as much harm to come to ourselves as to whoever has wronged us.
• If a person becomes too well-known, (s)he risks splitting into two people - who (s)he is and who other people think (s)he is.
• If your friend must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.
• In the world of concrete action we must respond with more than just understanding and compassion
• It helps to be able to detect the momentary onset of another person’s negative facial expressions before they assume their mask.
• It is a form of blindness not to see that someone else’s perspective on things is probably different and can be just as valid as your own perspective.
• It is good to give with joy, but is best to give without pain and without seeking joy.
• It is natural to find value through exchanging the gifts of the earth and the produce of human effort. But unless the exchanges are fair it will lead some to greed and others to hunger.
• It is wise to build a reputation as someone with whom others will feel like cooperating.
• Just as a child is happy when its parents are happy, we feel the disgust when we see others disgusted.
• Most people initially tend to cooperate, at least until they are betrayed by the other side.
• Persuasion should be without pressure, threats or psychological tricks.
• Rather than destroy ourselves over our disagreements, why can’t we bring some modesty and kindness to our endless conflicts with others and debates with ourselves?
• Rejecting another person’s idea is always easy; improving it takes effort.
• The benefits that one person or group receives are inevitably dependent on their bargaining position - what they can offer or threaten compared with others.
• The less we recognize the freedom of the other person, the less we experience our own.
• The more foreigners I talk with, the more I think we aren’t much different.
• There is always going to be a number of ne’er-do-wells among us.
• Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbours.
• We all ought to let go of the goal of ‘winning arguments’.
• We are always engaged with the world and with others, as valuers and meaning-givers.
• We can’t categorize people in just one way. One person can belong to many classes. Each of us may belong to a particular religion or a race, speak a certain language, and have different interests.
• We should learn how to turn conflict into an asset.

Perception

• Experience is not the passive reception of sensations, it is the construction of a personal story, which depends on involvement with other people.
• Local judgment comes from our perception, but universal judgment is the work of our theoretical imagination.
• Our culture is a set of special intellectual glasses through which we interpret experience.
• Our house of experience has two stories; a ground floor of quick perception and an upper storey of slower reflection and imagination.
• Our knowledge of what something ‘is’ is initially set by our perception of it; this anticipation is then confirmed or otherwise by our actual response; afterwards, our reflection and perhaps consultation with others enables us to know it, and to fix it as having some specific meaning.
• Perception is anticipatory; we speedily align what we notice with the patterns we have acquired in our mind and body.
• Sometimes perception is dominant in our actions; at other times reflection becomes paramount.
• The body is pitted against the eye.

Philosophy

• A large part of the job of philosophy is to persuade people to throw away some of the ladders up which our culture has climbed in the past.
• Art and philosophy are humankind’s relief from purposeless existence.
• Even the philosophers who believe that matter is not real still take their horse to be shod and their carts to be mended.
• Extreme scepticism, thinking that all knowledge is not only provisional but is not worth seeking, is impractical for living in the everyday world.
• Good was taken from the rhetoricians, and some philosophers subordinated it to Truth.
• He who teaches that not reason, but love should rule opens the way for those who rule by hate.
• How we classify things in the world is best regarded as through looking at many instances and seeing similarities and differences. Some categories, like humans or dogs, may seem very clear; but all our categories are created by humans in language.
• Idealistic philosophers fail to distinguish between the customary or conventional regularities of social life and the regularities found in nature.
• It is an old joke about philosophers that their worst habit is claiming that all except themselves are wrong. But most religious leaders have very similar habits.
• It is dangerous to expect that book learning can replace experience.
• It is folly to think that we can take a single detached viewpoint about things in the world.
• It is just as unwise to accept things as inevitable as it is to wish for the impossible.
• It is tricky to walk on both sides of the street that separates pragmatism from virtue.
• Most philosophers’ stories are more notable for what they leave out, and what they undervalue, than for what they actually say.
• No appeal to authority, not even religious authority, can get us out of the difficulty that the idea of ‘rightness’ or ‘goodness’ differs in its logical status from that of absolute truth.
• No ideas, institutions or edifices created by humans are above the need to be changed when better knowledge becomes available.
• Obscurity in philosophy may succeed in putting down readers who are not in the know; but it will destine their authors to irrelevance.
• Old philosophers should be regarded as admirable, brave, honest and noble, even if they are now seen as largely incorrect.
• Philosophers are very unwise to bracket out reality.
• Philosophers may be regarded as parasitical eccentrics living off the surplus value of a society to which they have nothing in particular to contribute.
• Philosophical errors are due less to logical mistakes than to the inauthenticity of semblances.
• Philosophy is useless if it does not relieve the suffering of the mind.
• Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
• Philosophy should not limit itself to wonder at the harmony of the universe; it also ought to address disharmony, ugliness and evil.
• Philosophy should prepare us for the softest landing possible when we fall over the cliff of reality.
• Precise and logical philosophical arguments do not necessarily lead to good practical guidelines.
• Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
• Reality is the moment of vision before intellectualization takes place.
• Reason is persuasive, not imperative.
• Revivals of older ideas are not often a good thing.
• Schisms in ideas are part of the natural progression of ideas; but so are compromises and re-unions.
• Some past philosophers proposed essentialism, the idea that we can find the underlying essence of perceivable things, and describe them by means of definitions. That idea still holds sway, but is not a view that leads to progress.
• Superstitions are dangerous, but the beliefs of philosophers are at worst ridiculous.
• The best explanations are usually the simplest. But some simple explanations can rest on wrong assumptions.
• The deepest questions philosophy has traditionally posed - such as “How should I live?” and “What is the meaning of life?” - have to be answered in terms of what we can experience and put into practice through choices and actions in our own lives.
• The genuine philosopher lives unphilosophically.
• The idealists’ greatest troubles spring from their impatience to better the lot of their fellows.
• The job of philosophy is to help us to find meaning in existence.
• The more people learn to think, the more they will disagree – but only, if they are wise, to begin with.
• The task for philosophy is to help us interpret our indistinct pulses of distress and desire, and therefore save ourselves from mistaken schemes for happiness.
• There is a difference between poetical enthusiasm and considered conviction.
• Too much reason in philosophy is a poor substitute for affirming life and facing its dilemmas head-on.
• Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.
• Unless we have some hope of finding answers to important questions, philosophy is not worth doing.
• We call a river by the same name, even though its water is different from moment to moment, and even though its course may change.
• We can look at things in different ways: what it is made of, what its structure is, how it appears, how it behaves and what use we can make of it.
• We catch only fleeting glimpses of ourselves while we are involved in the world.
• We should not ‘accept’ philosophers like we ‘accept’ a religion; we should instead try to learn something from what they say or write.
• We don’t have to think about everything that we do - we just do it.
• We should not try to separate reason, sensuality, feeling and will. Each one is part of us, and we need to control them like a four-horse chariot.
• Whenever we assert that something is so, we create a division, by implying that the opposite is not so.

Psychology

• Many people are fascinated by, and like to listen to, demagogues – regardless of their message. They offer an alluring spectacle and experience.
• The magical rites of a tribe whose crops failed may not have helped materially, but may have simply provided a psychological prop.
• There are those who, deprived of the comfort of having an enemy, keep trying to invent one.
• There are two differing views of sanity; statistical (i.e. how most people behave) and normative (i.e. how much in line with some accepted norm of behaviour the person is).

Quality

• A person who cares about what he sees and does has the characteristics of Quality.
• An aesthetic view is the ability to see Quality before it has been intellectually defined, or put into words.
• Aspects of Quality in thought, speech and writing are Unity, Vividness, Authority, Economy, Sensitivity, Clarity, Emphasis, Flow, Suspense, Brilliance, Precision, Proportion, Depth; all are difficult to define.
• At the moment of pure Quality, subject and object are identical; this is the moment of ‘getting with it’.
• If there is too much division of the world into Substance and Method, there’s no room left for Quality.
• People’s views of Quality differ slightly because they are overlaid with their immediate emotions.
• Pure science, mathematics, philosophy, and logic, are not things that depend strongly on the presence or absence of Quality.
• Quality is associated with morality, but not traditional poseur morality.
• Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live.
• The classic pattern of rationality can be tremendously improved by recognizing Quality.

Relaxation

• Actively participating in games seems to improve a person’s style of living.
• If the meaning of life is life itself, then the comic way might stop us taking everything too seriously.
• If we spend too much time with philosophy, we grow blind and insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and joys.
• It is the relaxed and easy man or woman, who is in no hurry, who is your most efficient worker.
• Our everyday style should be to let go and relax, and have trust in the world and ourselves.
• Our minds can wander and miss something important when we consciously try too hard to concentrate. More relaxed, disengaged attention may be better.
• There are three good things about becoming and behaving more like children, 1) spontaneity; 2) orientation to the here and now; 3) ease of verbal and bodily expression.
• We are better off if we can restrain ourselves from always reflecting on things; as a rule, we should care little about the possible distress of failure.

Religion

• Any belief is an illusion when wish-fulfilment plays a prominent part in its motivation.
• A religion cannot be limited to personal ethics; it must consider inspiration and motivation, and it must include a way of good living in a society.
• By all means believe in super-humans and demi-gods if that helps; but it can’t be a requirement. If you have to dissimulate to avoid persecution, feel free!
• Certain belief is a comfortable prop for many people. But there are now too many different ‘certain beliefs’ in the world. Pluralism is inevitable.
• Fanaticism is idolatry; narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness.
• Fasting and other forms of self-negation may inspire our contemplation, but that contemplation will not always lead us down a good path.
• Few people are able to stand on their own feet without the support of faith or dogma of any kind.
• Hell really means ‘an open prison for our own obsessions’.
• How can we explain the inequality of rewards and punishment?
• I am against any form of millennialism. We should not expect the universe to stop at some specific time in the future.
• I should only believe in a God who would know how to dance.
• If a religious sceptic demands proof, the faithful hide behind the door marked ‘mystery’.
• If all you think you need is release from guilt, or to be saved from your sins, then by all means join the ‘Save Our Souls’ sect.
• If there is ‘original sin’, it’s laziness. The ‘tempting serpent’ in the stories of some religions is just the easy story we listen to before reflecting or opening ourselves out.
• If there is a God, there should not be anything that God isn’t. If God is separate, he has boundaries, limits and hence is finite, not infinite.
• In a God, many people want a human-like being, one with whom one can have a personal relationship.
• In my view, a God and all his attributes are creations of ours. The original idea has been co-opted by rulers and hierarchies, and has become distorted to suit their interests.
• In religion, ordinary followers want something less exacting, with more clear-cut formulae, and more exciting than long-winded philosophical arguments.
• Is any doctrine, however convincingly proved, worth the sacrifice of even a single friendship between two persons?
• Is not religion all deeds and all reflection – accompanied by wonder and a surprise that arises even as we do our everyday activities?
• It seems hard to be a believer in a God or gods without falling into idolatry, intolerance and persecution.
• It seems obvious that one should never wage a war for the sake of religion.
• Most of us want our beliefs to be confirmed rather than proved false, and we will disregard any inconvenient evidence.
• Most people do not want spirituality, but rather a religion that gives them emotional satisfactions, answers to prayers, supernormal powers and earnable salvation in some sort of posthumous heaven. And some of those who do desire spirituality or deliverance find the most effective means are ceremonies, vain repetitions and sacramental rites – which explains why priests still have a role!
• Most people want to believe in miracles, and many also want to believe in visions of gods.
• Much religion is an irrational faith that is rooted in submission to a power, however strong, omniscient and omnipotent, and in the abdication of one’s own power and strength.
• Mysticism is too private and too various to make any claim to universal authority.
• One cannot by any magic escape the conditions of humanity.
• Religion can be discussed only with the greatest difficulty.
• Religion has to do fundamentally with drawing man out of the burden of pre-occupation with himself.
• Religion is not just ethics; it is about living in a society, and inspiration.
• Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as foolish, and by rulers as useful.
• Religion is the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
• Religion should be a force in cultivating the social dimension of wisdom. But inflexibility in religious doctrine is by its nature anathema to the contextual suppleness of wisdom.
• Religions can fall into the trap of using most of their energies to maintain their own power structures.
• Religions that make no appeal to the emotions have very few adherents.
• Revelations are an aberration of faith; they are an amusement that spoils simplicity.
• Some religious people claim that it makes sense to believe an idea because it is impossible.
• Supposed miracles will not aid the conversion of the unconverted, nor advantage the converted.
• Sure and certain beliefs are an easier, but not a reliable, philosophy of life.
• The Good is central, and is in step with the world and the universe; so cannot be separated from the pragmatics of the world.
• The practice of religion can easily lead people to practice evil.
• The vacuum left by the decline of the old religion of many gods has been filled, not by well-considered rationalism, but by hopeful mysticism.
• Theology is not a science; it is a sort of enlightened ignorance.
• There is a dangerous human desire to suborn ourselves to forceful, decisive, seemingly knowing charismatic figures.
• There is no cosmic potentate, controller of destinies, supreme judge.
• There is no single sacred language, no unique tongue in which the Good is communicated. If it can’t be translated into everyone’s language, it isn’t worth much.
• To label certain things as sacred and others as profane leads to narrowness of mind, ossification of thought, ignorance of pragmatics, and separation of a hierarchical elite.
• Too much familiarity with sacred writings breeds a kind of reverential insensibility, a stupor of the spirit, an inward deafness to the meaning.
• Vast numbers of ordinary, thoughtful people want there to be something else besides everyday living.
• We all at some time in our lives need examples to follow, people with good spiritual qualities that we can look up to.
• We do not hope because we believe, but rather we believe because we hope.
• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
• Whatever divides the followers of different religious faiths, two things unite them. One is that they believe theirs is the only true religion. The other is that they cannot prove it.
• Your daily life should be the temple for your religion; that is where your attention and ability should be directed.

Rhetoric and Demagoguery

• A demagogue has to keep repeating the key message to catapult his propaganda.
• A demagogue is effectively asking us for willing suspension of disbelief.
• A demagogue wants listeners to forego their filter of reason.
• A demagogue’s leadership strategy requires the glorification of ‘us’ and the vilification of ‘them’.
• Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.
• Logical arguments are like eels; they easily slip from our mind’s grasp. They need to be supported by stories, metaphors, images and style.
• The basic rules of a demagogue are “simplify, then exaggerate”.
• The main tricks of rhetorical speakers are presumption, omission, repetition, emotional attack and ambiguity.
• We should always begin listening to an orator by reminding ourselves that their purpose is probably to manipulate our response and maybe also our actions. This sometimes applies to what we read as well.
• What counts, with most people, as ‘success’ of an action is not just the action itself, but how well it is embellished by the associated ‘talk’.
• Words are not the same as things.

Rituals

• A great deal of ritualistic religion is not spirituality, but occultism - a refined and well-meaning kind of white magic.
• Festivals and rituals – sometimes even drinking bouts – may help us to gain useful meaning. But they may equally entrench prejudices.
• Images can be valuable as triggers to contemplation; but we should not worship them.
• It is not good for a society when its rituals become too important.
• Religious practices are relevant to a particular time and place. They may be meaningless in a different environment.

Self Knowledge

• A stringent and unswerving self-conception is usually a sign of intolerance toward people with a different outlook; a self-important person becomes blind to alternatives.
• Humility is the moral agent’s proper perspective on himself; we should think of ourselves as capable and dignified, but also dependent and corrupt, rational agents.
• If things go badly for us, it is often folly to blame ourselves; likewise if they go well, it is folly to congratulate ourselves and assume that it is because we have the truest religion or best philosophy.
• If we want to make the world better, we should start off with our own heart, head and hands.
• If we make a mess of things, we shall have ourselves to blame - not religion and not God.
• It’s easier to forget yourself for the sake of others when you are confident in your own identity and purpose.
• It’s not just desire or self-interest that causes our problems, but our urge to follow the crowd, be liked, and believe against all hope.
• Many people do not want to take personal responsibility for their lives; something or someone else is always to blame.
• Once we feel the call of personal responsibilities, and with it the responsibility of helping to advance knowledge, we cannot return to a state of implicit submission to tribal magic.
• Our background greatly affects how we interpret our experiences; we classify them according to what we have experienced already.
• Our ‘self’ is a kind of friend with whom we can discuss silently and invisibly.
• People who live totally unexamined lives are not only rather shallow, they are potentially dangerous.
• Quiet reflection and meditation can make a person happier and healthier.
• Recognizing our fallibility is an important aspect of self-knowledge, and more important than telling entertaining but exaggerated stories.
• Self-control is really the art of making the future bigger.
• The person whose attitude is one of excuse rather than self-responsibility denies her or his freedom and adopts instead the pose of being a victim.
• Just as a successful slave owner ought to treat his slaves with respect, our conscious self ought to be respectful of our instincts and feelings.
• To be able to concentrate or contemplate, we must learn to be alone with ourself at times, without any distractions or pastimes.
• We can all too easily lose sight of ourselves and go with the flow, resulting in unintended domination by others and over-concern with commonplace activities.
• We can only develop our knowledge and make good judgments is possible only if we have achieved an attitude of humility.
• We live our lives forward, but understand them only backwards.
• We need an absence of vanity, indifference to what other people say, and less desire to be liked; but at the same time we should be careful to avoid apathy.
• We should aim for that mature freedom of spirit which is equally self-control and following of our heart.
• We stop to think only when our simple acting and coping is not going quite as we want.
• What we think and how we think about it tell the story of who we are on the way to becoming.
• When we are just acting and coping, we are not constantly thinking of a goal.
• When we imagine things, we shed our humbler role as conveyors of experience, and assume a more imposing role as originators of experience.
• When we think we suspend our ordinary involvement in the world, and instead pay a disinterested attention to it; not as someone we speak with, but as a resolutely silent ‘other’.
• Without updating ourselves, we are in danger of forcing new situations into the structure of old ones.

Unthinking

• Inability to think is not just a failing of the many who lack brain power, but an ever-present possibility for scholars as well.
• The great majority of mankind are admirers and worshippers, rather than thinkers.
• The more fragile an idea is, the more terrifying its defenders are.
• The need to think can never be stilled by the insights of ‘wise men’.
• Unthinking humans are like sleepwalkers.

Wisdom

• Accept the things you cannot change, have the courage to change the things you can, and seek the wisdom to know the difference.
• Few people are wise enough to prefer, from other people, useful criticism to treacherous praise.
• I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
• It is important to effectively pass on wisdom to future generations.
• Knowledge without compassion is inhuman, compassion without knowledge is ineffective.
• Life is indeed darkness when there is no urge; and the urge is blind save where there is knowledge; and all knowledge is vain save where there is work; and all work is empty save where there is love.
• Misplaced confidence in reason is the wellspring of idiocy.
• Old age does not automatically confer wisdom, and being young does not automatically preclude it.
• Older adults are able to behave in a more emotionally even-handed manner than are young people; they grow more emotionally supple, and they are able to adjust to a changing situation on the basis of their emotional intelligence and prior experience.
• Standing too close to a low building means that one doesn’t realize that a building behind is taller. It’s similar with seeing meaning in life.
• Strict proof plays no part in human life outside mathematics.
• The essence of wisdom is to hold the attitude that knowledge is fallible, and to strive for a balance between knowing and doubting.
• The unwise person puts how things turn out down to luck; the wise person sees a range of possible outcomes, some more likely than others.
• To develop from knowledge into wisdom one must emerge from an incestuous fixation with family, clan and even nation.
• To separate wisdom from action is a form of malpractice in the conduct of one’s life.
• We crave wisdom; we worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves - precisely because it will help us lead a meaningful life as we count our days, because we hope it will guide our actions as we step cautiously into that always uncertain future.
• When mass emotionalism reigns, wise people may be best lying low.
• Wisdom comes not from thinking of our lives as distance from birth, but from thinking in terms of distance to death.
• Wisdom is a quality not only of individuals but of groups, institutions and societies at large.
• Wisdom is based upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty.
• Wisdom means understanding of what is important, in relation to the acting and thinking that we need to do.
• Wisdom often thrives after adversity in early life. Having life easy may not be good for one’s emotional intelligence.
• Wisdom requires us to frequently mediate or referee between ever-conflicting inputs: of emotion and reason, of narrow self-interest and broader social interest, and of instant rewards and future gains.
• Wisdom resides not just in our judgment or actions, but also in the process that produces them.
• Wisdom’s very complexity and fuzziness exiles it to the fringe of academic interest.

Women

• The fact that men and women are all human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish them from one another.
• The traditional view of women, treating them as objects or possessions, prohibits them from seeking their own path, and so is a form of oppression.
• Women have different strengths than men. But so do some men from other men. But for most things we have to do, any human who is equally physically or mentally fit can do the job just as well.

Youth

• Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all. Let them seek; they may find pleasure, but they will find a lot else besides.
• The young like to behave wildly to make sure they don’t get mistaken for boring adults.
• The young often talk foolishly; this is due to their limited experience of life.

Earthling editor’s note: Some of the sayings above are very similar to ones I have come across in my own reading here on earth. Earthling authors whose bon mots seem to align with several in this list are as follows:

Hannah Arendt, RG Collingwood, Confucius, Richard Dunford, Michael Allen Fox, Erich Fromm, Mark Gerzon, Kahlil Gibran, Stephen Hall, Anthony Hatzimoysis, Martin Heidegger, Richard Holloway, John Humphrys, Aldous Huxley, William James, Anthony P Kerby, Stephen Law, Richard Layard, Friedrich Nietzsche, M Scott Peck, Robert Pirsig, Karl Popper, Dave Robinson, Richard Rorty, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Searle, Seneca, John Sitton, John S Spong, Laurie Spurling, Samuel Todes, Francis Wheen, Owe Wikström and Richard Wilson.

Some other earthling authors whose have said or written things similar to one or two in this list are as follows:

Louise Antony, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Michael Ayers, Joseph Badaracco, Simone de Beauvoir, Gillian Bendelow, Nalini Bhushan, Alain de Botton, Gerrit Broekstra, Edmund Burke, Gibson Burrell, Carlos Castaneda, Didier Cazal, David E Cooper, Gary Cox, Nick Crossley, Marcel Danesi, John Dewey, Albert Einstein, Epicurus, Nabil Fayyed, François Fénelon, Antony Flew, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Yiannis Gabriel, Jyl Gentzler, JW Goethe, David Grant, Jonathan Haidt, Cynthia Hardy, Rom Harré, Daniel Harris, Richard Heck, David Hume, JR Jones, Immanuel Kant, Alistair Kee, Søren Kirkegaard, Jacques Lacan, Peter Lamarque, Gottfried Leibniz, GE Lessing, Peter Lipton, Michael Losier, Donald MacKinnon, Nelson Mandela, Iain Mangham, Deirdre McCloskey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, JS Mill, Michel de Montaigne, Joseph G Moore, Blaise Pascal, John Passmore, DZ Phillips, Madsen Pirie, Michael Polanyi, Anthony Quinton, John Rawls, Rush Rhees, Loyal Rue, Miriam Salzer-Mörling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Peter Singer, Adam Smith, Nicholas D Smith, Baruch Spinoza, JP Stern, Robert Sternberg, Robert L Stevenson, Sharon Street, Wafa Sultan, Jonathan Swift, Charles Taylor, RH Thouless, Barbara Tuchman, Miguel de Unamuno, Anne Wallemacq, Geoffrey Warnock, Peter Winch, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Antony Zijderveld.