Bygone Conclusions

“Without stepping out the door,
You can know the world.

Without looking through the window,
You can see Heaven's Way.

The longer you travel, the less you know.”
― Tao Te Ching - Chapter 47

“As I’ve aged, I’ve come to prefer the idea to the reality of human company.”
― Sol Luckman, Musings from a Small Island: Everything under the Sun

“literature, not academic treatises, affords a truer insight into an understanding of the human condition. While professors are busy strangling everything with jargon and footnotes, novels and poems are out there doing the real work: showing us what it actually feels like to be alive.....Literature is a better moral compass because it throws us into the vivid chaos of individual lives, instead of forcing human experience into some procrustean theoretical framework. Sometimes a single sentence from Orwell, or Solzhenitsyn, or Camus tells us more about integrity, honour, cruelty and hope than a thousand pages of scholarly ‘analysis’ ever could...”
― Michael Rainsborough

“And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
― Philip Larkin, Collected Poems