Jonathan Sari

“Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the Master takes action
by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm at the end
as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire;
what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people
of who they have always been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao.
Thus he can care for all things.”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“In The Politics, Aristotle observed that citizens “who enjoy too many advantages—strength, wealth, connexions, and so forth—are both unwilling to obey, and ignorant how to obey, the law.”
― Nick McDonell, Quiet Street: On American Privilege

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”
― Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death

“Humboldt later put it succinctly: ‘The wooded region acts in a threefold manner in diminishing the temperature; by cooling shade, by evaporation, and by radiation.”
― Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World