Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child. I found this Cicero quote on Lapham’s Quarterly’s about page. A little research dug out the supposedly original version found in Orator Ad M. Brutum (46 BC). It goes like this: To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history? ...
John Carmack, while advising on the advent of AI and its influence on the Software Engineering profession: Software is just a tool to help accomplish something for people – many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don’t over-focus on the specifics of the tools. I have often fallen into the over-focusing trap in my career. The whole thread is well worth reading: ...
Quoting the last paragraph from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. ...
The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. –Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. ...