Excerpt from Skepticism and Animal Faith

“To me the opinions of mankind, taken without any contrary prejudice (since I have no rival opinions to propose) but simply contrasted with the course of nature, seem surprising fictions; and the marvel is how they can be maintained. What strange religions, what ferocious moralities, what slavish fashions, what sham interests! I an explain it

Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism

Excerpt from Interpretations of poetry and religion by George Santayana. “When we consider the situation of the human mind in Nature, its limited plasticity and few channels of communication with the outer world, we need not wonder that we grope for light, or that we find incoherence and instability in human systems of ideas. The

Excerpt from Planting A Vineyard, Georgics: Book II Arboriculture and Viniculture, Virgil

And don’t let anyone be so wise as to convince you to turn the solid earth when a North wind’s blowing. Since winter grips the soil with frost and won’t let a shoot that’s planted then fix its frozen roots in the ground. The optimum season for planting vines is when the stork that enemy

Discretion

Moreover, your wit is fully apt to all things, and to be rationally employed, not in a few or low things, but many and sublimer. Yet this one rule I advise you to observe—that you communicate vulgar secrets to vulgar friends, but higher and secret to higher and secret friends only: Give hay to an

Excerpt from Blockchain Revolution

Lunacy

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; to-day, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone

Not a single religion

“Why is there not a single religion whose precepts do not come from a sage and whose dogmas are not of a madman?” -Voltaire

Silence is golden

“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule. . . .Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer

of good, the commoner, the better

“I thinke it sufficient for any, whom reason may satisfie, by way of answeare to alleage this action and sententious position: Bonum, quo communius, eo melius et præstantius: a good thing the more common it is, the better it is.” -Dodoens, tr. Henry Lyte  

Moment of zen