in every man's life, however splendid or modest, there are episodes that mark one's journey as a reader or as a person. Reading Samuel Johnson's essays is both a personal and a reader milestone.
notes
shorts, fragments, travel notes, culture, books, stray observations that shape perspective
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for what would so soon destroy all the order of society, and deform life with violence and ravage, as a permission to every one to judge his own cause...
the ambition of petty accomplishments, in which we believe we’re advancing, but a wiser perspective offers the opposite diagnosis.
the assignment of prices by the invisible hand of the market reveals how we value certain things in relation to other things. This unveiling is quite amusing some times, harrowing in other occasions.
”The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” (The Rambler, No.2, March 1750)
a sword is perpetually suspended over our head. We dread our very guards, we distrust our companions.
the guiding principle has been, and will continue to be, to seek knowledge and beauty in books that have been tested by time. Exceptions are granted in areas of technical knowledge (e.g., physics, computer science)
one distinction between what Taleb writes in Fooled by Randomness and what Wittgenstein gets at in Tractatus is that the former deals with the practicalities (and sarcasm) of daily life, whereas Tractatus is onto the ontological, epistemological, and linguistic.
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