Wisdom Takes Work

“Disce quasi semper victurus Vive quasi cras moriturus Learn as if you were going to live forever, Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald reminds us, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

“We alone among all species have been given a powerful mind and the gift of reason—but how do we use it? To make up reasons for what we already want to do.”

“Criticism may not be agreeable,” Churchill once said, “but it is necessary; it fulfills the same function as pain in the human body, it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things.”

“Merton’s best books, Seeds of Contemplation, a spiritual classic.”

“forty-two. At the same age, Neil Peart, then probably the greatest drummer in the world, started taking lessons from Freddie Gruber, a jazz teacher who had worked with many of his peers. “What is a master but a master student?” Peart said with a shrug. “And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.”

“And this, too, shall pass away.”

“Socrates said at one point. “What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and the strength of which his body is capable.”

“There is no freedom without wisdom, there is no wisdom without freedom.”

“To philosophize, Cicero—who himself was put to death by assassins on a dusty road outside Rome—had written, is to learn how to die.”

“Life is a school in which we live all our days,” Eleanor Roosevelt”

“physicist John Wheeler said that as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of ignorance,”

“From the sublime to the ridiculous,” Voltaire observed, “is only one small step.”[*]”

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of the lessons that history has to teach us,” Aldous Huxley once said.”