You cling to misery because it has some investment somewhere, it works. Now once you know it works, ’it always gets the old boy’, you have stumbled upon a key. Now you will go on using that key. That’s why you are miserable. When you...
TELEOLOGY. This also comes from a Greek word, telos, meaning “purpose” or “end.” Teleology (or consequentialism, as it is often called) asserts that no act is right or wrong in and of itself, but that its rightness or wrongness depends on the goodness or badness of the consequences it brings. In other words, if you get a good...
A generation after Bentham, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) tried to save utilitarianism by recasting it as a more humane, less calculating doctrine. Mill was the son of James Mill, a friend and disciple of Bentham. James Mill home-schooled his son, and the young Mill became...
Please don't judge me as cynical. But I've mentally conditioned myself to expect ungrateful. Here's what I mean. In Norman Vincent Peale's positive thinking classic called, well, The Power of Positive Thinking, this ceaselessly optimistic minister encourages us to "expect ingratitude." As I understand it, his point is that most...
Happiness is the function of your consciousness when it is awake. Unhappiness is the function of your consciousness when it is asleep. Unconsciousness is your mirror burdened with great dust and luggage and past. Happiness is when the burden has been dropped and the mirror...
THE WOMEN OF PHOCIS The deed of the women of Phocis has not found any writer of high repute to describe it, Byet it is not inferior in point of bravery to anything ever done by women, as is attested by imposing sacred rites which the Phocians...
I've seen people get into fights that consume the most valuable years of their lives. I know of one gentleman who took on a large organization. Because he felt he had been treated unjustly. And he knew he was right. He could have settled the matter with...
But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rested on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away. That is why, looking him straight...
Inventor Charles Goodyear lived in poverty when he wasn't stuck in debtors' prison because none of his inventions worked. He was a man sparked by ideas that had great promise and no realization. Failure, debt, doubt, the urge to tinker, and the need to stop tinkering...
They met only once. During the New Year’s holiday season of 1927, Albert Einstein called on Sigmund Freud, who was staying at the home of one of his sons in Berlin. Einstein, at forty-seven, was the foremost living symbol of the physical sciences, while Freud,...
