All of these conspiracy theories depend on the perpetrators being endlessly clever. I think you’ll find the facts also work if you assume everyone is endlessly stupid.

Brian Moore

David Suchet likes to think of life as a spider’s web. The spider, you see, spins his web from behind; he can’t see what he’s creating. “The only time he can check what led to what is when he turns around,” says Suchet pensively. “So in our life. We don’t know what we’re spinning, what we touch, what we do…”

… I learned a very simple way of keeping myself on the right path. That was to ask myself regularly throughout the day “Is this God’s will?” without seeking for a precise answer. What I found was that my actions would change in response to the question, a bit like a sailing boat responding to the helm.

Is This God’s Will? - Journal - In Terra Aliena, Source: terraaliena.squarespace.com (404)

I have no good advice, but here’s some I gleaned from a letter Benjamin Haydon, who rarely gave him good advice, wrote to John Keats: “God bless you my dear Keats, don’t despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.”

What we call progress is just screwing up in new and inventive ways.

Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

A quote from the Mark Forster forum:

My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader’s mind — vividly, forcefully — that good writing, which stops with clarity and logic, doesn’t.

The moral: You gain more by not being stupid than you do by being smart. Smart gets neutralized by other smart people. Stupid does not.

From J. L. Carr’s 1980 novella “A Month in the Country" :

We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours forever — the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.