We as beasts are wild by nature,
Prone to every sort of vice.
Character requires training,
Lack of which extracts its price.
This was an attempt to write something that you might find in a Primer for Young Men a century ago. However, they likely would have used more complex words, as at that time, educated young men could be expected to understand them. (Wow, I sound am old.)
I get in close, I spit and shine
I agonize on every word
I never take that one step back
To see I’m polishing a turd
Piet Hein, Grooks:
A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people to get what there is of it
wrong.
Piet Hein, Grooks:
Let the world pass in its time-ridden race;
never get caught in its snare.
Remember, the only acceptable case
for being in any particular place
is having no business there.
Our operating policy
(borne out in practice too):
Never use a whole ass
when half-an-ass will do.
Dedicated to artificial deadlines and the automatic responses they engender in project managers.
I wrote this some time ago, and was reminded of it when reading an excerpt from The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis:
When Thought contends that minds emerge
from random patterns in a surge
of neurons firing as they must, it
gives me then what cause to trust It?
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory:
If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
Recalling what you once could do
Can make you feel so old
Imagine just how young you'd feel
If you only didn't know
If I wanted to, I could;
I am yet convinced of it.
Therefore I remain unchanged;
Listless body, idle wit.
Inspired by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Sudelbücher:
Die sichere Überzeugung, daß man könnte, wenn man wollte, ist Ursache an manches guten Kopfes Untätigkeit, und das nicht ohne Grund.
To make a clever man believe
That you are different than you seem
Is harder still than to assume
The form you wish him to perceive
I've been reading (very slowly) through Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Sudelbücher, and came across the following aphorism, which I liked and—lacking the sense of a wiser man—decided to recast as a poem in English.
Kluge Leute glauben zu machen man sei, was man nicht ist, ist in den meisten Fällen schwerer als wirklich zu werden, was man scheinen will.
