✹ For today’s edition of Wisdom Letter, we have carefully curated five bite-sized quotes from brilliant thinkers such as Doris Lessing and James Baldwin, each paired with a philosophical question designed to provoke deep reflection.
Quote № 01:
“In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.”
— Doris Lessing (1919–2013), “Martha Quest”
~ Follow-up Question:
What emotional and moral scars are left on those who must spend their lives biting their tongues and bearing witness to folly, not because they agree, but because speaking up might cost them everything—how does one carry the weight of that silence with dignity?
Quote № 02:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
— James Baldwin (1924–1987)
~ Follow-up Question:
Is it possible that the stories that most devastate us also awaken a sacred sense of belonging, and if so, why must connection so often arrive through anguish rather than joy?
Quote № 03:
“Who hasn't asked oneself, am I a monster or is this what it means to be human?”
— Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), “A hora da estrela”
~ Follow-up Question:
When faced with our own capacity for cruelty, selfishness, or indifference, how do we discern whether we are deviating from our humanity—or merely uncovering the darker truths of what being human actually entails?
Quote № 04:
“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”
— Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003), “Last Evenings on Earth”
~ Follow-up Question:
How can we reconcile the human desire for continuity and connection with the inescapable truth of mortality—does our persistence in living, loving, and seeking beauty in the face of death reflect defiance, hope, or denial?
Quote № 05:
“Humans, the only self-regarding animals, blessed or cursed with this torturing higher faculty, have always wanted to know why.”
— Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014), “Writing and Being”
~ Follow-up Question:
If no definitive answers ever come, yet we continue to question the nature of suffering, love, and existence, does our unyielding need to understand reveal courage, or a tragic inability to accept what simply is?
✽ Thank you for reading today’s Wisdom Letter.
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Maze Heart, the curator of Philosophors
When faced with our own capacity for cruelty, selfishness, or indifference, how do we discern whether we are deviating from our humanity—or merely uncovering the darker truths of what being human actually entails?
It was not possible to own, to seek redemption for my ‘monstrous’ capacity for cruelty, selfishness and indifference, until, from a dark place of despair caused by my lack of humanity I could ‘see’ clearly, what was forsaken.
To become fully human, required first, to ‘see’, to own, my shadow.
To know oneself fully, to own one’s capacity for monstrous behaviours is the first step to becoming fully human.
Thereafter, it is a choice.
No. 4, Something in me is saying “inevitability”, but what that entails? No idea just yet, but thank you for planting that seed ;)