We pay too much attention to the most confident voices—and too little attention to the most thoughtful ones.
Certainty is not a sign of credibility. Speaking assertively is not a substitute for thinking deeply.
It's better to learn from complex thinkers than smooth talkers.
via Substack
I would do well to remember this during the coming year.
“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
— Thomas Carlyle via Philosophors
Yeats by Cillian Murphy.
When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.
- Abraham Heschel
Margaret Renkl finds a solution for dealing with our times that is much like Austin Kleon’s.
In recent years, I’ve been looking for a solution to this conundrum. How is it possible to be a well-informed citizen and simultaneously a calm, mostly cheerful, more or less sane human being?
The closest thing I’ve found to a workaround is the right dosing. I follow the news during daylight hours. At night, I read a book.
Sometimes it’s a poetry collection I can finish in an evening. Sometimes it’s a memoir or a thick, juicy novel that will carry me through a week or two. Often it’s an essay collection, a genre which comes with those lovely, built-in stopping places that make it easier to close the book and avert a wrestling match with the clock.