This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.
Paul Desmond (1924-1977), quoted in Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…
Not inspirational, for a change, but simply delicious word-play. To quote the passage in Pinker’s fascinating book, it is “the musician Paul Desmond’s comment on women who marry for money rather than romance.”
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Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari (4th or 5th century AD)
Obviously, this is a horribly pertinent hindsight for the UK and western Europe right now, but it’s also very relevant for we sovereign professionals. If you want a peaceful life and career, you need to make preparation for hard times and adversity: savings, of course, but also mental resilience, tenacity, a warm network of contacts, alternative – if less lucrative – sources of income.
Para bellum.
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If you can bear to…
…watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
Rudyard Kipling, If— (1910)
This is another quote that comes via the Daily Stoic newsletter. We all recognise the opening lines of Kipling’s famous verse: “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” but I don’t think I’d ever paid attention to these lines from the second verse.
Resilience, grit and small-s stoicism.
The full poem is worth revisiting here. A bit Victorian perhaps, but none the worse for that.
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For a long time, I have told my discouraged patients and have repeated to myself, “Do not let us build a second story to our sorrow by being sorry for our sorrow.”
Paul Dubois, Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders, pp. 235-236 (1909)
I came across this is an excellent, recent essay by Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Tin-Can Monster.
Image: http://www.neuro-bern.ch/cms/index.php?id=238&L=0, PD-alt-100, https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5710620
Simplicity in planning fosters energy in execution. Strong determination in carrying through a simple idea is the surest route to success.
Attributed to General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
I’m disappointed to learn that, like so many elegantly formed aphorisms, there is no record of von Clausewitz actually saying this. The nearest I can find is from his classic text, On War (Book 1, chapter 7):
“Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War, Suppose now a traveller, who towards evening expects to accomplish the two stages at the end of his day’s journey, four or five leagues, with post-horses, on the high road—it is nothing. He arrives now at the last station but one, finds no horses, or very bad ones; then a hilly country, bad roads; it is a dark night, and he is glad when, after a great deal of trouble, he reaches the next station, and finds there some miserable accommodation. So in War, through the influence of an infinity of petty circumstances, which cannot properly be described on paper, things disappoint us, and we fall short of the mark. A powerful iron will overcomes this friction; it crushes the obstacles, but certainly the machine along with them. We shall often meet with this result. Like an obelisk towards which the principal streets of a town converge, the strong will of a proud spirit stands prominent and commanding in the middle of the Art of War.”
Image: By Wilhelm Wach – Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=695673
“Just when the gods had ceased to be, and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone.”
Gustave Flaubert, letter to Madame Roger des Genettes, from The Letters 1830-1880
Such an evocative sentence.
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“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
Attributed to W. Edwards Deming (but incorrectly, it would seem).
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If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, letter to Marcus Terentius Varro
Varro, I learn, was Rome’s leading expert on gardens and agriculture at the time and the literal translation is ““If you have a garden in your library, everything will be complete.”
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It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book IV 4.98
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Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.
Attributed to Buddha.
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