Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Leopold wrote: One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Tolstoy wrote: The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Sinclair wrote: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Confucius wrote: If I raise one corner for someone and he cannot come back with the other three, I do not go on.

For the young, there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals

“Man did not weave the web of life – he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

ertyu wrote: ↑

Tue Jun 23, 2020 4:39 pm

Seconding the mom and dad poem, v. topical By I think the same author

Out of work
divorced
usually pissed
He aimed low in life
And missed

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

I have learned that to be with those I like is enough.

And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

When I give, I give myself.

In the faces of men and women, I see God.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

I know I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be
understood

jennypenny wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 26, 2020 2:51 pm

Same with Whitman. I connect with him more than any other writer. He was criticized for kissing up to Emerson and being a bit of a huckster, but I find his writing much more evocative than Emerson's. If Emerson's writing was the soul of the transcendentalist movement, Whitman's was its flesh.