Things that arrived at the right moment
Marginalia
“Wise words are rarer than emeralds, yet they come from the mouths of poor slave girls who turn the millstones”
Egyptians
A Little History of the World, E.H Gombrich
JUN 17, 2026
“In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?”
Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates
Plato, Apology
Socrates said this at his trial, knowing it would condemn him. He chose examination over survival. That is the part the maxim does not say — that examination has a cost, and he paid it.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics
Often misattributed to Aristotle in this exact form — the phrasing is Will Durant's gloss. But the underlying idea, the doctrine of hexis, is unmistakably Aristotelian: character is what we have practiced into being.
“Man is condemned to be free.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman
Founders should read this every morning.
“Cogito, ergo sum.”
René Descartes
Discourse on the Method, 1637
The first certainty. Everything else can be doubted, but not the doubting itself.