Chengyu: Four-Character Chinese Expressions

心神不宁 (xīn shén bù níng): “to feel bad about nothing” 损人利己 (sǔn rén lì jǐ): “to seek benefit at the expense of others” 幸灾乐祸 (xìng zāi lè huò): “to enjoy others’ misfortunes” 力不从心 (Lì bù cóng xīn): “the qualities aren’t at the level of the aspirations” 亦步亦趋 (yì bù yì qū): “to blindly imitate someone” 桃李满天下 (táolǐ mǎn tiān xià): “to have pupils everywhere” 省吃俭用 (shěng chī jiǎn yòng)...

 Aurelius Quotes on Mindfulness

2.8 Rarely is a person seen to be in a bad way because he has failed to attend to what is happening in someone else’s soul, but those who fail to pay careful attention to the motions of their own souls are bound to be in a wretched state. 2.11 Let your every action, word, and thought be those of one who could depart from life at any moment. 3.4 Do not waste what remains of your life in forming impressions about others, unless you are doing so with reference to the common good. For you are...

 Understanding Cause and Effect is Based on Experience

Were a man, such as Adam, created in the full vigor of understanding, without experience, he would never be able to infer motion in the second ball from the motion and impulse of the first. It is not anything that reason sees in the cause, which make us infer the effect. Such an inference, were it possible, would amount to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the comparison of ideas. But no inference from cause to effect amounts to a demonstration, as being founded merely on the compar...

 Mental Illness is Not Correlated with Genius

What madness may have to do with creativity and genius has continued to intrigue down to this day, with scholars arguing for and against the association, its benefits and its deficits. In 1995, in a large scale and statistically convincing study of 1,004 eminent individuals of the 20th century, psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig argued that no necessary or sufficient correlation, hence no causal connection, between mental illness and creative achievement was to be found. Individuals in artistic profe...

 Forage on the Enemy

作戰: 故不盡知用兵之害者，則不能盡知用兵之利也。善用兵者，役不再籍，糧不三載，取用于國，因糧于敵，故軍食可足也。國之貧于師者遠輸，遠輸則百姓貧，近于師者貴賣，貴賣則百姓財竭，財竭則急于丘役，力屈財殫，中原內虛于家，百姓之費，十去其七，公家之費，破車罷馬，甲冑矢弩，戟楯蔽櫓，丘牛大車，十去其六。 Waging War: It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted...

 How Scientific Thought Differs from Ancient Thought

If we consent for the time being to denude the mind of philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions, and take the matter in the most simple and naive way possible, I think our answer, stated in technical terms, will be that [science] substitutes data for objects. (It is not meant that this outcome is the whole effect of the experimental method; that as we saw at the outset is complex; but that the first effect as far as stripping away qualities is concerned is of this nature.) That Greek sc...

 The Truth Religion

The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind the Shrievalty, the Cessoria, in a sense behind the Mercatoria itself. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civil...