[Author’s Note: This essay first appeared in published form in February 2015 as a chapter of my book Pantheon. Since I use the phrase Fortress of the Mind as my motto and colophon, I wanted readers to know its origin and special significance to me.]
Thought
Look At The Small Picture, Not The Big Picture
You’ve got to get with the big picture!
You’ve got to remember the big picture!
You’ve got to see the forest for the trees, man!
Get outside yourself, and look at everything!
My Own Ten Commandments (Podcast Reading)
This is a reading of My Own Ten Commandments, one of the most popular articles to appear here in 2015. It lays out some key points in my worldview.
Your Character Has Two Components
Every man’s character has a dual quality to it. One quality is etched into every man’s consciousness from birth, more or less. And this is the quality of reason that Nature herself has endowed us with; it is that which separates us from the unreasoning brutes.
It is a universal quality, in the sense that every man possesses it. From this rational aspect we get our innate sense of justice and fairness. It is also what gives man that special curiosity about the world: it is that which impels him to make inquiries into everything, to investigate everything, and to try to find answers for the riddles of Nature.
Greed Is A Corruptor
Pyrrhus was a powerful king who ruled Epirus and Macedon for some years during the Hellenistic period. Plutarch tells a revealing story about him in his Parallel Lives (Life of Epirus, 14).
One of Pyrrhus’s valued advisors was a man named Cineas, who was entrusted on many foreign missions of great sensitivity.
[To read the rest of my article, click here.]
My First Podcast: Part One Of A Lecture Series On Stoicism
I have decided to add podcasts to the content offered on my site. There is a refreshing value in mixing the presentation of material by audio, along with material already offered in a written format.
Because of the many questions I receive on Stoicism, and the enduring interest in this subject, I have decided to give a series of 10 lectures on Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes.
I published a translation of Stoic Paradoxes
Since this is the first podcast I’ve made, I appreciate the feedback of listeners. I expect things to become additionally refined as we move forward.
The World Will Provide
Our spirits are driven by two things: appetite and Reason.
Appetite is the hunger for pleasures, and Reason is the rational impulse. When Reason does not control the appetite, then the appetite usurps the leadership position of the spirit.
And this is a sure road to ruin.
Appetite leads us around aimlessly by the nose, this way and that, like some kind of insensate farm animal.
What Is It Like To Get Older?
One of the questions that I’ve been asked a lot these days is how one’s perceptions change about things as one gets older. A lot of younger guys in their twenties or thirties want to get a glimpse of what lies around the corners of life that they will be approaching soon.
[To read the rest of the article, click here.]
One Illusion Is Only Worth Another Illusion: The Judgment Of Bocchoris
Here is a sly and amusing story that I came across in Plutarch this weekend. We find it in his Life of Demetrius (Ch. 27). It is short, but effective.
There was an Egyptian pharaoh named Bakenranef, who was known to the Greeks as Bocchoris (names of foreign rulers and notables were often Hellenized by historians). According to the chronicler Manetho, he ruled Lower Egypt as a king of the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty from 725 to 720 B.C. According to tradition, he was famous for his wisdom and prudence.
Success Can Be Fatal
I was eating today at one of those a kilo places in Rio: one of those places where the food is purchased by the total weight. The greater the quantity of food, the greater the price. It turned out to be an opportunity for reflection on the price not of food, but of achievement.
Where food is concerned, nourishment is measured in quantities, by weight. But so is life, or mortality, in a way.
For the doctors of medicine assure us that one can die just as readily from overeating, as from under-eating. Excess is just as much a danger as dearth. And in the developed world, it is more of a danger. For few of us will be faced with the prospect of starvation in our lives. More likely, our challenges will come from the over-abundance of choices, from the temptations of bounty.
Quintus Curtius 
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