Otis Chandler

“At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“Third, I went from craving classical wisdom to consuming memes and tweets and tech news—which led to my imitating ideas without knowing it. I knew more about what blogger Gary Vaynerchuk had to say about happiness than Aristotle.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“Since modern man has no way of knowing what is going on beyond himself, since he cannot know everything, he would become lost in a world as vast and technically complex as ours, if he had really no one to guide him,” wrote Girard in his book Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky. “He no longer relies on priests and philosophers, of course, but he must rely on people nevertheless, more than ever, as a matter of fact.” And who are these people? “They are the experts,” continues Girard, “the people more competent than we are in innumerable fields of endeavor.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“The wilderness lives at the pace of what the Greeks called kairos time, which can be slower but is always richer. Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life