Practical Wisdom

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for "practical wisdom" as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

- From the Net

I think "practical wisdom" is different from "conventional wisdom" and the two should not be mixed. The former is "improvisation-based wisdom" whereas the latter is "internalization-based wisdom".

Life Isn't Fair

One does not always get what they deserve. There are undeserved experiences and people one has to meet and go through. Learn through them.

- From a blog

What to Be: Giver or Receiver?

I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver...It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

- John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, in an eulogy for a deceased friend, Ed Ricketts

Death Brings Life into Perspective

Death brings life into perspective.

- From a blog

Fragility of Morals

Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their ignorance of the misuse.

- Robert Wright

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral...

- Henry David Thoreeau