Luxury

Luxury is easier to rent than maintain.

This War Can Make a Hero

This war can make a hero from a man like that
And claim the best in nameless piles of dirt.

Death is A Friend

Death is a friend we meet when we are young, fear when we are grown, and welcome when we are old.

Happiness is Lived

Happiness is lived. Sorrow gets written down

Security Over Freedom

Perhaps some people prefer security over freedom because then they can blame someone else for their misery.

The Grave Consumes

The grave consumes the conquered and the conqueror.

Divine Ambiguity

There are two theological statements I disagree with. The first is that there is nothing divine in the world. The second is that the divine will is unambiguous.

Travel

Travel makes you realize just how many people there are in the world who are completely unaware of all the things that trouble you the most.

Grief

I know that in the great cosmic equation, my grief amounts to nothing. But that does not make it any less mine.

To Look and See

What is a miracle? To look at the familiar, and see the unexpected.

Misleading Notes to Myself

One life is fragile. Life itself is not. Life continues deep within the earth and inbetween the stars.

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Thomas Pynchon: a seriously talented writer determined not to take his talent too seriously for too long.

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Pynchon's Inherent Vice: Shaggy grows up, ditches Scooby-Doo and the gang, goes public with his drug use, changes his name to Sportello, and becomes a private detective in L.A.

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Every respiration is a part of the same process that moves the planets and illuminates the stars. Being is creation.

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God is one of the ways we attempt to understand what is beyond our understanding.

The Advantages of Ambiguity

Ambiguity is underrated. It is often more valuable than precision. Nature is an economizer, adapting existing structures in novel ways. Very precise adaptations with no other uses are a sure-fire path to extinction in a world of perpetual change. Language that is too precise, that never changes spelling, meaning, or pronunciation, has all the excitement of a life insurance contract or a will.

Misleading Notes to Myself

Markets are like wives: they tell you what you need to know, but you don't always like what you hear.

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There are many fine and worthwhile things beyond the comprehension of individually articulated reason. Beyond the mind of any one man there are the minds of all.

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Creativity does not begin with logically solving a problem; it begins with an inspired solution.

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Life has two parts. The first is finding what you love and learning how to love it. The second is learning how to let it go.

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Who does not hope for a life after death? Only those who believe that love is never misunderstood in this one.

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Entrepreneurs are the deviants hiding in the closets at business schools.

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Rast's Law: Every successful business eventually turns into the department of motor vehicles. Then it dies the death that it deserves.

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When one animal meets another, it has one of only four instinctive reactions: kill it, cooperate with it, ignore it, or flee it. Consider it a measure of human progress that we are at least more likely to oppose those we meet than we are to kill them.

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Much to the dismay of all sorcerers and an uncomfortably large number of scientists, human invention is not formulaic.

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One life always depends upon the lives of others. You may obtain what you need from others by force, fraud, aid, or trade, but if you successfully use force or fraud, you will create the social condition where you must constantly seek a more clever fraud or a more effective force when you aim to improve your standard of living. In other words, you will enter into an arms race of force and fraud with other self-serving bullies and liars, a pact of social suicide.

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Art is religion without divinity. Religion is art with the divine. Why do people go to museums? For the same reasons people used to go to church.

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Three things you should acquire in an education, regardless of major:
1. The ability to think logically.
2. The ability to present your ideas well, in writing and orally.
3. The ability to calculate.

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Even our most beautiful words are poor clothes for God. We are like dogs barking at the moon, inspired by what we see and very proud of the sounds we make.

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Although we would not choose it, it is our struggle that makes us most fully what we are.

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We make a serious mistake when we try to turn one kind of knowledge into another. Prices are like words: they are not scientific constants and cannot be managed as you would manage temperature, melting points, or atomic weights.

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Accounting is more language than math. Contrary to what many people expect of accounting, it does not offer us a world of unchanging facts. It offers us a reliable but only temporary and largely metaphorical way of describing reality.