🖼️ 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, insight, and wisdom to live your highest good.
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
The American philosopher and writer James Miller on St. Augustine and the quest for wisdom:
The quest for wisdom can be wayward, and a wise man cannot live by reason alone. These are two of the morals that one might draw from Augustine’s own account of the first half of his life in his Confessions. … ‘There is more than one road to wisdom,’ Augustine had averred in an early dialogue. But he gradually grew wary of ‘a lust for experimenting and knowing’ and became convinced that a good life was best achieved not through the contingencies of one person’s reasoned quest for knowledge but rather in a closed community of shared beliefs that authoritatively united argument and order, reason and faith—and forcibly excluded the alternatives. […]
Source: Examined Lives
📜 Perennial Maxim(s)
The philosopher and theologian St. Augustine (354—430) on doing the ‘right’ thing:
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💡 Perennial Insight(s)
The United States Navy vice admiral and Medal of Honor recipient James Stockdale (1923—2005) on handling pressure:
Living with stress and knowing how to handle pressure is necessary for survival. It is related to a man’s ability to wrest control of his own destiny from the circumstances that surround him or, if you like, to prevail over technology. Tied up with this ability is something I can express in one word: ‘improvisation.’ I mean man’s ability to prepare a response to a situation while under pressure.
George Bernard Shaw said that most people who fail complain that they are the victims of circumstances. Those who get on in this world, he said, are those who go out and look for the right circumstances. And if they can’t find them, they make their own. … My pitch is that if the energy of will and creativity necessary to improvise under pressure can be taught, they are best learned in a stressful regime—in a crucible of pressure, whether that crucible is a classroom or a total environment. […]
Source: Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot
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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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