Thought

Some Thoughts And Opinions On Investing

Quintus Curtius Thought , ,

I’m certainly not a finance person.  At least I don’t consider myself one.  I am just a country lawyer.  I have no magic formulas for anyone, unless common sense and my own experience can be considered a magic formula.  I have no magic wands, no hidden secrets, no rabbits to pull out of a top hat for you.  But I do have some modest experience in dealing with my own money and investments.  I’m also a practicing bankruptcy attorney–a job I’ve been doing for over 20 years–and have represented a very large number of individuals and businesses.  I’ve seen what things get people into trouble, and what things do not.  One begins to notice recurring patterns, and I have tried to distill these into cautionary principles.  The result is what follows.

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The Nutriment Of Hippocrates

Quintus Curtius Health & Fitness, Thought , , , ,

The Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, who flourished around 500 B.C., was even in ancient times known for his obscurity and elusiveness.  His well-deserved nickname was “The Obscure,” due to the fact that his elliptical sayings could be variously interpreted.  Yet this was no impediment to his influence; his renown was considerable, and his fame rested on the strength of one book, On Nature.  Time has not preserved it for us intact, but we do have about a hundred short fragments, and these provides us with the rudiments of his thought.

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The Mind Of Hippocrates

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Thomas Kuhn, in his brilliant 1962 treatise on the structure of scientific revolutions, proposed that the advancement of knowledge takes place more often in periodic surges than through slow, incremental linearity.  He proposed that progress can best be understood as a sequence of “paradigms;” in his view, a paradigm was a kind of general consensus on how systems should be understood and interpreted.

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The Mystic Conviction Of Ibn Musaed

Quintus Curtius Thought , ,

The mystic Yunus Ibn Yusuf Ibn Musaed was born around 1132 into the Mukharik family, of the tribe of Shaiban (بنو شيبان).  The subdivisions of this tribe occupied an area called the Jazira, a region covering what is now eastern Syria and upper Mesopotamia.  He would later found an order of dervishes that came to be called, according to his biographer Ibn Khallikan, the Yunusiya.

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Jack London In The Abyss

Quintus Curtius Thought, Travel & Exploration , ,

In 1902 Jack London resolved to travel seven thousand miles from California to England.  His stated purpose was to lose himself in the docks and slums of London’s squalid East End, and see what he might learn from the experience.  One might reasonably ask why he would do this, when numerous examples of urban misery could be observed in the cities of his own country, such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or any of a dozen others.  But the idea was actually presented to him by his British publisher after the release of London’s first book in England.

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Sustained Effort Is Needed For Grand Designs

Quintus Curtius Literature, Thought , , ,

Great enterprises require a sustained effort over a long period of time.  They cannot be pursued in fits and starts with intermittent bursts of energy; and they demand a confluence of factors that only coalesce on rare occasions.  There must exist the ability and talent to conceive the project; there must be intense initiative and endurance to carry it through to completion; and, as a practical matter, the creator must have the leisure and financial ability to sponsor his labors.  If any of these requirements are wanting, there will be no progress.

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The Apple

Quintus Curtius Thought , , , ,

There is an allegorical short story written by H.G. Wells entitled The Apple.  Several men in a “third-class carriage on a Sussex railway,” each absorbed in his own thoughts, begin to talk among themselves.  One announces that he is in possession of what he calls an “apple from the Tree of Knowledge,” and that he “must get rid of it.”

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Real Kings Are Not Common

Quintus Curtius Thought , , ,

We live in times of feeble leadership.  Those who occupy public offices often seem more willing to advance their own interests than those of the citizens they represent; they tremble at the thought of taking any action or initiative that might involve risk on their part.  And so the citizenry suffers to buttress the careerist ambitions of the few.

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Flee From Those Who Drain You, And Seek Those Who Sustain You

Quintus Curtius Thought , ,

There is a certain truculence that must figure in the disposition of an independent spirit.  He who strays from the approved paths through the forest must be prepared to swing his machete with vigor and persistence at the tangles of vegetation that obstruct his forward movement.  He will seek to test the boundaries of the enclosures that surround him, and will always be probing for opportunities to detect fractures and imperfections in their constructions.

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Sorrow Is Not The Right Response To Time’s Rapid Passage

Quintus Curtius Thought , , , ,

In his short biography of the poet Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson makes the following comment:

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