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“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
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“I’ve never met a Normie (our lingo for a person who doesn’t have a problem with drugs or alcohol) who could even conceive of what it’s like to be an alcoholic. Normies are always going, “There’s this new pill you can take and you won’t want to shoot heroin anymore.” That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of alcoholism and drug addiction. These aren’t just physical allergies, they’re obsessions of the mind and maladies of the spirit. It’s a threefold disease. And if it’s partly a spiritual malady, then there’s a spiritual cure. When I say spiritual, I’m not talking about chanting or reading Eastern philosophy. I’m talking about setting up the chairs at a meeting, picking up another alcoholic and driving him across town to a meeting. That’s a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don’t know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It’s about making a list of all the people you’ve harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That’s a spiritual lifestyle. It’s not a fluffy ethereal concept.”
― Scar Tissue
― Scar Tissue
“Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is. And when you presume there’s just one right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need the peace of mind.”
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“You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.
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― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
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― The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms
“I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?”
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
― Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder
Joel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Joel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
750 books
|
29 friends
571 books
|
13 friends
27 books
|
4 friends
2 books
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13 friends
215 books
|
4 friends
241 books
|
72 friends
118 books
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42 friends
1 book
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5 friends
More friends…
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