500 Great Quotes: #500
“To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.”
~ from Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited.
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Commentary: This quote is profound for me because it’s consistent with my personal experience. My coming of age and transformations began in earnest when a person I loved and intellectually admired contradicted so much I had been taught. The incongruities between the truths in her perspectives and the maxims I had always been taught was not only a major influence on my pursuits of knowledge, but equally it was the beginning of a love affair with doubt.
I had been raised to fear, belittle, ignore, and counter doubts. Doubts, in my early philosophical training, were equated with sin and weakness. It wasn’t until I was older that I listened to and became friends with my doubts. It is through investigating doubts that we find wisdom.
Sometimes it takes only being in love with one unusual person to unravel much of the rest of your previously arranged world – just as it only takes one exception to disprove a proof, or it only takes one crack to let the water flow.
Be warned: If you ever encounter such a person, they can reprogram your root definitions, causing you to lose orientation and reference points. In that new and unfamiliar place, you can choose whether or not to begin a new search for wisdom.
If you’re lucky in your life you may encounter a few people who, once they reveal their beautiful mind to you, you concede there is now way to avoid loving them.
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Update for regular readers: After writing yesterday’s post, WordPress removed the block on this account that prevented it from forwarding posts to Facebook. I thank them. As I did a few days ago, I thank them for their consistent work to provide publication for ordinary writers like me.
New post notifications will now be sent in real time to the OneMoreOption Facebook page.
There will likely be a new post tomorrow.
Many of the posts I’m writing now are detailed, requiring coordination, extensive research, and fact-checking, particularly with all the post series I’m developing. These days there are many posts in various stages of drafting.
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Bravo!
So many bogs, these days, are trivial, banal and self-absorbed. To read them is to feel one’s energy draining away. It is such a relief to find exceptions to the rule, such as this blog.