Principles of Adult Behavior by John Perry Barlow

Be patient. No matter what. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. Expand your sense of the possible. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself. Tolerate ambiguity. Laugh at yourself frequently. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right. Never forget that,...

 Of All Times in which to Live, You Would Choose Today

I don't think in terms of one year, but I can tell people what I genuinely believe, which is that if we take responsibility in being involved in our own fate if we participate, if we engage, if we speak out, if we work in our communities, if we volunteer, if we see the joy that comes from service to others, then all the problems that we face are solvable despite all the terrible news that you see, despite all the genuine cruelty, pain, and hardship people are experiencing all around the world...

 Life is Joy If We Use Our Time to Correct Our Faults

There is no evil. Life is a blessing. If it is not, then know that you are at fault. And you have been given time to correct your error, to have the joy (the highest blessing) of correcting your fault. That is the only reason for time. If you do not correct your fault, it will be corrected against your will — by death. Yes, life is a blessing. There is no evil. There are only our faults, faults in general and our personal ones, and we have been given the joy through time of correcting them....

 Thin Slices of Joy

“Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’” Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or th...

 Friedrich Engels Funeral Oration for Marx

Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc, and that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people ...

 Archimedes Discovers How to Measure Volume

Hieron asked Archimedes to discover, without damaging it, whether a certain crown or wreath was made of pure gold, or if the goldsmith had fraudulently alloyed it with some baser metal. While Archimedes was turning the problem over in his mind, he chanced to be in the bath house. There, as he was sitting in the bath, he noticed that the amount of water that was flowing over the top of it was equal in volume to that part of his body that was immersed. He saw at once a way of solving the proble...

 The Journey, Not the Answer

It never occurred to me that there was going to be any stumbling block. Not that I had the answer, but [I had] the joy of going at it. When you have that joy, you do the right experiments. You let the material tell you where to go, and it tells you at every step what the next has to be because you're integrating with an overall brand new pattern in mind.

 Knowledge Can be Transferred, but Not Wisdom

Positive, objective knowledge is public property. It can be transmitted directly from one person to another, it can be pooled, and it can be passed on from one generation to the next. Consequently, knowledge accumulates through the ages, each generation adding its contribution. Values are quite different. By values, I mean the standards by which we judge the significance of life. The meaning of good and evil, of joy and sorrow, of beauty, justice, success-all these are purely private convicti...

 Teaching Children About Death

In a discussion on my blog regarding teaching kids about death, one of my readers commented that he uses a book called Lifetimes, by Bryan Mellonie. He explained that the book describes the lifetimes of various living things and focuses on the life that happens in between birth and death. He explained, “I tell my kids that they do continue, not only in the life matter and lineage cycle, but as part of the world/universe per se. ‘The world produced life and us along with it. We are not se...

 The Pursuit of Truth Puts One in Contact With the Infinite

The fascination of any search after truth lies not in the attainment, which at best is found to be very relative, but in the pursuit, where all the powers of the mind and character are brought into play and are absorbed by the task. One feels oneself in contact with something that is infinite and one finds joy that is beyond expression in sounding the abyss of science and the secrets of the infinite mind.