🌦️ Harmony and balance
Plus = Minus, Joseph Albers
Too much of anything is probably a bad thing, variety is the spice of life, and eudaimonia is what we should be aiming for.
Sent from my laptop, perched on a Lisbon balcony overlooking the Tagus.
…← All notes
#quotation
It’s very difficult to be very lazy
It’s very difficult to be very lazy. It takes a lot of imagination to do nothing and you have to be sufficiently self-confident not to have a bad conscience. You have to have a taste for life, so that every minute is complete in itself and so you don’t have to keep saying ‘I’ve done this or that.’ You need strong nerves to do nothing. Being lazy also means that other people’s opinions don’t matter. Nor does the idea of always having to prove yourself.
…
Creative destruction
For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.
…
Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.
– Ilya Prigogine
Mosquitoes in the room
"We all know the elephant in the room' — the topic that everyone knows is there, but no one talks about. But what about the mosquitoes in the room, the tiny things we sense but ignore?"
— Mariana Alessandri, 'The fourth wall' (New Philosopher, #49)
…
Dead-alive, hackneyed people
Already in 1877, Robert Louis Stevenson called busyness a "symptom of deficient vitality," and observed "a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation".
…
Intelligent companions
If you find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go along with him, overcoming all dangers, pleased at heart and mindful.
But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest.
…