fragile ego: educational background

04 September 2009

educational background

I got an e-mail from a friend of mine from graduate school, BR. He left our graduate school, in part, because he was disgusted by the way I was treated after being sexually harassed. He is now at a different university, finishing his Ph.D.

I mentioned that to A last night night. He looked at C, and said, "Wow, Mommy has really smart friends. Daddy sometimes feels intimidated by this."

Is BR smart? Yes.
Is he smart because he's working on his Ph.D.? No. BR is just a smart guy.

I think A is a smart guy, too. However, I have learned over the past 8 months (omg, it's been 8 months!) that he feels intimidated by me, sometimes, due to my educational background.

It's just weird. I don't think of myself as smart, and I certainly don't think someone is smart because of their degree(s).

...just thinking out loud...

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*. . . thinking . . .*

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it? ... Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, both in opinion and practice. (Michel de Montaigne, 1592)

"All things come out of the one and the one out of all things. ... I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! The very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one you entered before.'"(Heraclitus)

"Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, ...and care so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul ...?" (Socrates via Plato)

"Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist." (Epicurus)

"All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with Nature." (Zeno of Citium)

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." (Albert Camus)

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." (Bertrand Russell)

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." (Bertrand Russell)

"Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it." (Leo Tolstoy)

"If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system." (William James)

"Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!" (Nietzsche)

"Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." (David Hume)

"As long as justice and injustice exist, human beings must be willing to do battle for the one against the other." (John Stuart Mill)

"Meditate often upon the bond of all in the Universe and their mutual relationship. For all things are in a way woven together." (Marcus Aurelius)

"Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises."

"A friend should be a master at guessing and keeping still: you must not want to see everything. "

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. "

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. "

"One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive. "

"A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness. "

"Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it. "

"All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good. "

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

"Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?"

"I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his "divine service." "

"All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie? "

"This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves. "

"We have art in order not to die of the truth."

"What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!"

"It is not things, but opinions about things that have absolutely no existence, which have so deranged mankind!" -from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 563, R.J. Hollingdale transl

"People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see." - from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.489, R.J. Hollingdale transl.

"New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self...."

"I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it."

(both from Nietzsche's Antichrist)