Wisdom

Meditations 5.20 is usually read as a pep talk. In context Marcus Aurelius was writing about people who obstruct you, and the method he gives is reservation and conversion.

The ancient biographers say students at Croton listened for five years before they were allowed to speak. The rule was quality control on opinions.

148 discoveries were made twice, independently. Market pioneers fail 47 percent of the time. If nothing is new, originality was never the entry fee.

Nolan put the Odyssey in theatres this July. I went in expecting a war story. It is not one. The war is already over when the poem starts.

Almost every philosophy that survives seventeen centuries is a philosophy of addition. Learn more, earn more, become more. Plotinus taught the opposite.

Ecclesiastes 11 opens with a line most people read as poetry: cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days.

Marcus Aurelius wrote Meditations as private notes to himself, never intended for publication, while running an empire and burying children and fighting wars he didn’t choose.