Signposts

What we choose to fight is so tiny…
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from the poem “The Watching Man”  <link>

A little socializing, like a little whiskey, is good. But more is not better. The sobriety of solitary silence is superior to the sloughing off of self into the social, and the value of the latter is to enhance, by way of contrast, the delights of the former. Thus spoke the introvert.

— Bill Vallicella (via)  <link>

We are unknown, we knowners, to ourselves… Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, “Each is the farthest away from himself”—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.

— Friedrich Nietzsche  <link>

The science of the scientist can understand everything in the Cosmos but the self of the scientist.

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos  <link>

Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos  <link>