Bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less, according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the bottom, will find...
A LONE fisherman one day brought up a brass bottle, stoppered with lead, in his net. Though the appearance of the bottle was quite different from what he was used to finding in the sea, he thought it might contain something of value. Besides, he...
A primordial Greek proverb maintained that nobody could ever be called happy until they were dead. It was a favourite saying of Solon, an Athenian leader and one of the ‘Seven Wise Men’ of the Greeks. He once visited the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia,...
What makes us enjoy doing something so much that we forget about whatever worries we might have while we do it? When are we happiest? These questions are also at the heart of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into the experience of being completely immersed in...
The Battle of Navarino was a naval battle fought on 20 October (O. S. 8 October) 1827, during the Greek War of Independence (1821–29), in Navarino Bay (modern Pylos), on the west coast of the Peloponnese peninsula, in the Ionian Sea. Allied forces from Britain, France, and Russia decisively defeated Ottoman and Egyptian forces which were trying...
“Hell is other people!”: Other people are hell insofar as you are plunged from birth into a situation to which you are obliged to submit. You are born the son of a rich man, or an Algerian, or a doctor, or an American. Then you have...
On a Monday in late June, after the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland, the billionaire collector Dakis Joannou docked his yacht in the small harbor of the Greek isle of Hydra. The yacht’s exterior is covered in a kaleidoscopic pattern that was designed by...
Let us add another story, not very improper for this subject, which Seneca relates in one of his epistles: “You know,” says he, writing to Lucilius, “that Harpaste, my wife’s fool, is thrown upon me as an hereditary charge, for I have naturally an aversion to...
And how is one to bring about sensitivity? Not that you must have regulations against picking the flowers, for when you are merely restrained by regulations, there is fear. But how is there to come into being this sensitivity which makes you alert not to...
The mind confuses the needs of the body with its own needs because the mind needs to know: What am I? We live in this world of illusion, and we have no idea what we are. The mind creates all these questions. What am I? becomes...
