Philosphies for the succesful life
SISYPHUS
Then I witnessed the torture of Sisyphus, as he wrestled with a huge rock with both hands. Bracing himself and thrusting with hands and feet he pushed the boulder uphill to the top. But every time, as he was about to send it toppling over the crest, its sheer weight turned it back, and once again towards the plain the pitiless rock rolled down. So once more he had to wrestle with the thing and push it up, while the sweat poured from his limbs and the dust rose high above his head.
The point:
Sometimes the lessons will be continually repeated until they are learnt. Sadly this is a lesson some people fail to understand their entire lives.
FRIEDRICH NITZSCHE, ON LAZINESS AND TIMIDITY
“… A traveller who had seen many lands and peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what quality in men he had discovered everywhere he had gone. He replied: ‘They have a tendency to laziness.’ To many it will seem that he ought rather to have said: ‘They are all timid. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.’
In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience – why? From fear of his neigbour, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbour, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveller spoke. He is right: men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them.
The point: It is an act of personal courage to be who you are and to assert your worth in the world by living as an authentic human being, the human being you were born to be, not a sheep.
NEURATH'S BOAT
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start
afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there,
and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and
driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
Otto Neurath
The Point:
We are all born into the world broken in some way or become broken by the world. We cannot return to the comfort of the womb and self-repair. We must first learn to accept our posoition as flawed and broken people, and attepmt to rebuild ourselves as we traverse life.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
Blaise Pascal (French philospher)
The Point: We go into the world looking for and hoping that someone will complete and make us what we need to be. The ideal is that we each do the inner growth work and discover how we were raised to live in the world and make corrections accordingly.