🖼️ Monday Muse
The “Monday Muse” is a weekly collection of reminders, insights, and maxims on the art of living. The term “muse” has two meanings: (1) a state of deep thought; and (2) a source of inspiration. May the following (in a small way) be a source of contemplation and wisdom to live your highest good.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
The writer and broadcaster Natalie Haynes on ancient history:
The Classics are worth whatever time you give them. … Classics have informed so much of our lives – our politics, our laws, our history, our culture, our language. We live in a world where a defiant refusal to acknowledge anything but the present is commonplace: the past is considered too boring and the future too scary. But the past is full of people just like us, people who lived ordinary lives in extraordinary times. …
Ancient history doesn’t just belong in dusty classrooms and dog-eared textbooks, it belongs in our lives now. As Thucydides, the Athenian historian, once wrote, ‘It will be enough for me if these words are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.’ […]
Source: The Ancient Guide to Modern Life
📜 Perennial Maxim(s)
The Greek playwright Sophocles (c. 497—406 BC) on kindness:
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💡 Perennial Insight(s)
The Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813—1855) on losing oneself:
So it is, too, that in the eyes of the world, it is dangerous to venture. And why? Because one may lose. But not to venture is shrewd. And yet, by not venturing, it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture, and in any case never so easily, so completely as if it were nothing—one’s self. For if I have ventured amiss—very well, then life helps me by its punishment. But if I have not ventured at all—who then helps me? And, moreover, if by not venturing at all in the highest sense (and to venture in the highest sense is precisely to become conscious of oneself) I have gained all earthly advantages… and lose my self! […]
Source: Sickness Unto Death
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W. Bertolotti
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