1/ Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known to English-speakers as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus, Rome's first, and in the eyes of many historians best, Emperor.
2/ Many of Horace's maxims survive to this day and are seen as excellent life advice.
I was drawn into reading Horace by this quote, which I thought was an excellent lens to view the ups and downs of life:
3/
“Many shall be restored that now are fallen and many shall fall that now are in honor.”
~Horace, "Ars Poetica"
I started back through my notes on him, and found several others that I thought others would enjoy, Here are some of the best of them:
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"Carpe diem!
Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have.
It is later than you think."
"A good scare is worth more than good advice."
5/
"Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you."
"Rule your mind or it will rule you."
“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.”
6/
“He who feared that he would not succeed sat still.”
“Without love and laughter there is no joy; live amid love and laughter.”
"We are but dust and shadow."
"Why do you laugh? Change only the name and this story is about you."
7/
“You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.”
“Humour is often stronger and more effective than sharpness in cutting knotty issues.”
“Subdue your passion or it will subdue you.”
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“What you have not published, you can destroy. The word once sent forth can never be recalled.”
“Pale death kicks with impartial foot at the hovels of the poor and the towers of kings.”
9/ Finally, here's one that I wrote in the Latin on my workbooks for doing the research for my book "What Works on Wall Street"
"Nullius in verba." (Take nobody's word for it.)
10/ I'm struck by the similarities between these quotes and those from The Stoics and from the Taoist masterpiece "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu.
It seems that if you're searching for wisdom, going back to those that have withstood the tests of time is a good place to start.
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2/ The author, Paul Kalanithi, was a neurosurgeon and writer who got a stage IV lung cancer diagnosis when only in his mid-30s. He died at age 37 in 2015, but not before writing "When Breath Becomes Air."
It's filled with insights that perhaps only a dying man could see clearly
3/ “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.”
And
“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
"Hey you, out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?
Hey you, don't help them to bury the light
Don't give in without a fight...
Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall"
~@pinkfloyd
I've often thought in an earlier era, they would have been poets or in the philosophy department of Oxbridge. This, for example, reminds me of T.S. Eliot:
"Far away
Across the field
Tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell"
And it's not just Pink Floyd, obviously.
I think you can find brilliant insights in many forms of music today, for example, the song "Patience" by Nas and Damian Marley is bursting with incredible ideas that really fit into an quest for a better understand of the 'truth'
1/ Our 5 most popular podcasts by downloads for 2020 plus the 2 fastest growing in downloads, thanks to my co-host @InvestorAmnesia and producer @MathewPassy for providing this list:
“What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.”
~Bertrand Russell
If you're still here and have tried some of the exercises I recommended about seeing the Prover working in other people and then tried the experiment on
2/ yourself by looking for things like green cars and perhaps surprised (as I was) by how many MORE of those things you saw, you've done more than most people in playing with Wilson's concept. But you're still on relatively safe ground in that you haven't yet tried to turn these
3/ new skills on some of your more deeply held beliefs. It is now that we enter what Wilson calls "“Chapel Perilous—Every thing you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous”
Change is scary for almost everyone. To paraphrase an Anthony de Mello quip,