The Sistine Chapel, Influence of English, Four Noble Truths, Shoulders of Giants, Self-Reliance and More
Knowledge Journey #10
Welcome to Knowledge Journeys. These paid subscriber-only articles are long-form curations of my discoveries from self-education. Each piece is a collection of stories, links, and quotes focusing on culture, languages, and philosophy. There is a free preview of every edition.
Hi reader,
I write to you from my new home of Austin, Texas.
The first few weeks here have been thrilling, terrifying, and interesting. Which is to be expected when you move to a place where you don’t really know anyone.
I wouldn’t want it any other way. I love the feeling of adventure.
I also love that you read this publication. Yes, you reading this right now.
My soul gets put into creating these blog posts. The fact people read and support it brings me indescribable joy. Thank you for being here. Don’t ever hesitate to reach out to me on Substack Notes or your platform of choice. I enjoy chatting with curious people on the internet.
Table of Contents For Knowledge Journey #10
Self-Reliance By Ralph Waldo Emerson Is A Heroic Essay
Quote From Steve Jobs’ Graduation Speech At Stanford
Naval Ravikant On Meditation
Brilliant Passage From Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
Writer Kurt Vonnegut On The Arts
What Are The Four Noble Truths?
The Exceptional Enrichment Of The English Language
The Shoulders Of Which Giants, Exactly?
David Deutsch’s Principle of Optimism Will Probably Save The World
What Are The Basic Claims of Evolutionary Theory?
Polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Writing From Italy
Excerpts From The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
39 Killer Quotes From Author Nassim Taleb
My 23 Favorite Films From The Best 100 Movies of All Time List by Empire
Why You Should Never Forget The Beauty In Simplicity
22 Magnificent Maxims From Mr. Mark Twain
5 Great Articles I Recently Read
This Painting I Put Up In My New Apartment Speaks To Me
2 Wonderful Poems
1. Self-Reliance By Ralph Waldo Emerson Is A Heroic Essay
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was an American essayist. He led what is known as the Transcendentalist movement, groups of writers and philosophers who emphasized the importance of intuition, individualism, and nature.
His essay Self-Reliance is one of the greatest works of art I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the essay:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.”
“To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.”
“Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion…Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”
“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”
2. Quote From Steve Jobs’ Graduation Speech At Stanford
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
3. Naval Ravikant On Meditation
The following is a powerful excerpt from a book I’ve written much about on this blog, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson:
“For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you.
You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles.
How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.
Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental ‘inbox zero.’ When you open your mental ‘email’ and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.
It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.
…Meditation doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to gain the superpower to control your internal state. The advantage of meditation is recognizing just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces, running around the room, making trouble, shouting, and breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control mad person.
You have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste toward it and start separating yourself from it. In that separation is liberation. You realize, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be that person. Why am I so out of control?’ Awareness alone calms you down.”
4. Brilliant Passage From Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German Philosopher.
His Essays and Aphorisms are some of the most brutal, yet insightful, writings I’ve ever read.
I am not sure where he wrote the following passage, but I saw it on X recently and wanted to share:
“When you find human society disagreeable and feel yourself justified in flying to solitude, you can be so constituted as to be unable to bear the depression of it for any length of time, which will probably be the case if you are young. Let me advise you, then, to form the habit of taking some of your solitude with you into society, to learn to be to some extent alone even though you are in company; not to say at once what you think, and, on the other hand, not to attach too precise a meaning to what others say; rather, not to expect much of them, either morally or intellectually, and to strengthen yourself in the feeling of indifference to their opinion, which is the surest way of always practicing a praiseworthy toleration. If you do that, you will not live so much with other people, though you may appear to move amongst them: your relation to them will be of a purely objective character. This precaution will keep you from too close contact with society, and therefore secure you against being contaminated or even outraged by it. Society is in this respect like a fire—the wise man warming himself at a proper distance from it; not coming too close, like the fool, who, on getting scorched, runs away and shivers in solitude, loud in his complaint that the fire burns.”
5. Writer Kurt Vonnegut On The Arts
Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American writer.
A World War II veteran, I read his novel Slaughterhouse-Five and did not know what to make of it. All I knew was that I was entertained.
On Substack Notes I recently saw this great quote from the author:
“Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something."
6. What Are The Four Noble Truths?
The Four Noble Truths are the basis of Buddhist philosophy.
Dukkha: Life involves suffering and dissatisfaction.
Samudaya: The cause of suffering is desire and attachment.
Nirodha: Suffering can be overcome by eliminating desire.
Magga: The path to ending suffering is the Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path includes right understanding, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration, to which I am very much new to learning so I will not say any more about it in this post.
I will say, however, that some books that have helped me deepen my understanding of Buddhism are The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, Waking Up by Sam Harris, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, and what is traditionally regarded as the actual words of the historical Buddha, The Dhammapada.
The ideas in these books have had an incredible impact on the quality of my mind.
Of course the nuance here is the important question: ‘do you really want to live without desire?’ To which my personal answer is a ‘hell no.’ Desires are what drive you to pursue excellence.
However, to experience moments of peace in this life, you must have the awareness that fundamentally, at the deepest level, it is your desires that are the source of all your suffering.
7. The Exceptional Enrichment of The English Language
I don’t think many native speakers of English realize how lucky they are that English is their native language. Why do I say this?