Phil Oliver

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The Old Ways: A J...
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by Robert Macfarlane (Goodreads Author)
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Swann’s Way
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Adam Gopnik
“What [Adam] Smith took from [David] Hume’s demonstration of the limits of reason, the absurdity of superstition, and the primacy of the passions was not a lesson of Buddhist-Stoical indifference but something more like a sense of Epicurean intensity—if we are living in the material world, then let us make it our material.”
Adam Gopnik

“Yet however much he read, there were whole categories of books the mature Emerson would not read. He would not read theology or academic controversy. He wanted original accounts, first-hand experience, personal witness. He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion…”
Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

Brian Greene
“Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be
barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.”
Brian Greene, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

Wallace Stegner
“He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man WITH SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH HIM.”
Wallace Stegner
tags: aging

“The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…”
Robert D. Richardson Jr., First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process

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