Ikigai DailyIdeas for living
Arguments, teachings and durable questions about attention, conduct and a meaningful life.
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Q2098Hume was twenty-eight, and the book sold so badly he later said it fell dead-born from the press. The claim inside this sentence is narrower than it sounds. Reason can tell you what follows from what, and how to get a thing you want; it cannot tell you to want anything. Wanting comes first. Three centuries later, patients with damage to the emotional centres of the brain turned out to reason perfectly and struggle to choose lunch.
Q2099Boethius wrote this in a cell, awaiting execution on a charge of treason he denied. He had been the most powerful official in Italy; now he had nothing. In the book, Lady Philosophy visits him and lets Fortune speak for herself — and Fortune's defence is that she never pretended otherwise. The image of her wheel, lifting and dropping kings, became one of the most copied pictures of the Middle Ages.
Q2100Ibn Khaldun lost both parents to the Black Death at seventeen, spent decades in and out of North African courts and prisons, then retreated to a castle in what is now Algeria and wrote the Muqaddimah in about five months. It set out to explain why states rise and rot. This passage describes what modern economists rediscovered in the 1970s and named after someone else: past a certain point, raising the rate lowers the take.
Q2101She was born Gloria Jean Watkins and wrote under her great-grandmother's name, kept deliberately in lower case so that readers would look at the argument rather than the author. Love, in her books, is not a feeling that happens to you but something you do — and she treated it as political work rather than private consolation, which is why the sentence puts choosing and resisting in the same breath.
Q2102Sontag wrote the book while being treated for advanced breast cancer, and kept herself entirely out of it — no diary, no scene at the hospital. Her target was the language around illness: the idea that tuberculosis belonged to the passionate and cancer to the repressed, that a diagnosis says something about the person who received it. Metaphors like that, she argued, add a second illness on top of the first, and this one is made of shame.
Q2115Nobody has found this sentence in Gandhi's writings, and researchers have looked hard through millions of published words. The earliest close match appears in 1974, in a chapter by an American educator named Arleen Lorrance. What Gandhi did write, in a 1913 column about snakebite remedies, is quieter and stranger: 'If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.' The slogan promises the world will follow. Gandhi only promised that your relation to it would.
Q2119Saint-Exupéry never wrote this sentence. Its earliest known appearance in print is a 1995 American diet book, where it is offered as an anonymous proverb, and his name was attached to it around 2007 by way of management seminars. The idea does echo a passage in 'Citadelle', the sprawling book found unfinished after his plane disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944. A good line, then, with a slightly embarrassing passport.
Q2120The version usually posted — 'the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves' — is not Russell's. It is a paraphrase, repeated by Charles Bukowski in a 1989 interview and credited back to Russell ever since. Russell's actual sentence was written in May 1933, a few weeks after Hitler took power, in an essay about why the confident were winning the argument in Germany.
Q2126He served two sultans, Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, and after Alp Arslan's death he held the real power for twenty years. He built a network of state-funded colleges and appointed scholars of the calibre of al-Ghazali to teach in them. Then he fell out of favour, and a single assassin ended him — and the empire he had held together began to come apart within months. Institutions outlast men, but only if the man remembered to build them.
Q2127It was written late, by a man who had already done the job, and it reads that way: less theory than accumulated practice, illustrated with stories of rulers who got it right or badly wrong. It is unsentimental about power — the ruler's authority should be absolute, the informants should be good, the treasury should be watched. Written nine centuries ago about a vanished empire, it survives because most of what it describes is not medieval at all.