Category: quotes

What god made for fun

Following up on my last post, here’s a quote I recently came across that made me chuckle:

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

Alan Watts

I wonder how often we inflate things by attaching a story to it that is much more elaborate than what is actually going on. Fact vs. fiction? In a way, we are sense making machines through stories. It’s how we manage to agree and disagree too, in politics and elsewhere.

This reminds me of my German classes in High School. Each time we’d read a poem our teacher asked us to interpret it. What did the poet mean with this? Inevitably it triggered an avalanche of hypothesis which made me wonder if the person who came up with the poem in the first place could have ever imagined all of this. 

What stories are you adding to your life?

Gratitude

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

Choices

“There were always choices to make. Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you become the plaything to circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning