Category: Wisdom Traditions

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Harold: You sure have a way with people.Maude: Well, they’re my species!—Harold and Maude, 1971 film He was no philosopher of abstractions as were Berkeley, Descartes, Kant. He was a moral philosopher, perhaps, a moralist…

Talk Less, Act Better

A living example often can have a stronger effect than thousands of theoretical teachings and rules.–Chan Khong Example is more efficacious than precept.–Samuel Johnson

Is This How It Will Be?

Yet we to whom the shortness of life has given frequent occasions of contemplating mortality, can, without emotion, see generations of men pass away, and are at leisure to establish modes of sorrow, and adjust…

Avoid Being Scattered

 But the fate of learned ambition is a proper subject for every scholar to consider; for who has not had occasion to regret the dissipation of great abilities in a boundless multiplicity of pursuits, to…

Be Reasonable

Open your heart to the influence of the light which, from time to time, breaks in upon you:  when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand…

The Communist and the Buddhist

[Nikolay] Valentinov … recorded his shock at Lenin’s certainty not only that Marx and Engels were absolutely correct, but that no fundamental principle they enunciated, about anything, could ever be changed.  “Nothing in Marxism is…

How Things Looked in 1990

All over the world, we are saturated by a contemporary culture of materialism, instant communications, and electronic luxury. Advertising bombards us with pulsating music, sexual imagery, and the urgent appeal to involve ourselves more and…

Advice from the Sages

I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with…