The Power of Acceptance
Pema Chodron in When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times: In practicing meditation, we’re not trying to live up to some kind of ideal—quite the opposite. We’re just being with our experience, whatever it is. If our experience is that sometimes we have some sort of perspective, and sometimes we have none, then […]
Aristophanes Rarely Philosophizes
Scottish writer, playwright and translator Kenneth McLeish writes in The Theatre of Aristophanes, Like Aeschylus, Aristophanes rarely philosophizes, rarely explains: philosophy and explanation vibrate in the actions and words themselves. In both artists, the polished intellectuality and elegant pattern-making of Sophocles or Euripides are replaced by rawness, illogicality, feeling itself. Our interest focuses not so […]
Price Matters
Seth Klarman’s extraordinary and mysterious book Margin of Safety, Risk Averse Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor has sold for $700 for used varieties with newer copies going for $2,500 to $4,000. His foremost investing premise is risk mitigation. He writes, Since transacting at the right price is critical, trading is central to value-investment success. […]
Jonathan Swift on the Genius of Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was the archetypal writer of the neoclassical period in Europe. In his amazing career, Pope set the paradigm for poetry and the moral and philosophical reasoning that defined his age. From Jonathan Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, In Pope I cannot read a line,But with a sigh I wish it […]
Don’t Take Experts at Their Word
Robert Cialdini’s Influence provides a particularly enlightening example of the human tendency to hang on to the words of the experts: There’s a funny story about a doctor who ordered ear drops to be administered in the right ear of a patient who was suffering from an ear infection. Doctors are notorious for poor handwriting […]
Suffering Can Herald Loving Relationships
From Pema Chodron’s Taking the Leap: When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when the whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and […]
We Suffer Because of Our Ignorance
Melvin McLeod writes in his introduction to The Best Buddhist Writing 2007: According to Buddhism, our fundamental problem is not sin or some moral failing. We suffer because of our ignorance; because we do not understand the actual nature of reality… The medicine that heals this illness of ignorance is insight or wisdom, which we […]
Warren Buffett Praises Charlie Munger
From Berkshire Hathaway’s 50th annual shareholder letter: If you’ve attended our annual meetings, you know Charlie has a wide-ranging brilliance, a prodigious memory, and some firm opinions. I’m not exactly wishy-washy myself, and we sometimes don’t agree. In 56 years, however, we’ve never had an argument. When we differ, Charlie usually ends the conversation by […]
In Praise of Pablo Neruda
Chilean politician Luis Corvalan writes in his essay “Pablo’s Examples” from El Siglo, We all know that he has sung in praise of everything-love, birds, stones, southern rains, the rough Pacific Ocean, the Araucan pine, cactus, spoons, onions, salmon-bellied eels, everything he ever saw and touched with his poet’s eyes and feelings. And also human […]
Consider the Opposite Perspective
From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much […]