I am catching up with sharing some quotes from what I read during our recent road trip. Today’s batch presents some ideas that I think are useful for self reflection.
On the Importance of Rituals
Protesilaos https://protesilaos.com/commentary/2026-07-27-importance-rituals/
“God is everywhere, but to the person with the tunnelled conscience God does not exist even if they consider themselves religious. Belief as such is not relevant. One can make the casual claim “I believe in God”, which usually has the same meaning as “I do not believe in anything in particular”. The reason is that belief only matters when it is expressed as a lifestyle. It otherwise is tokenistic, an exercise in virtue signalling, or a parroting of precepts that are devoid of substance.”
The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out
JA Westenberg https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-extreme-is-the-easy-way-out
“We talk about the boring middle. The lazy middle. The compromised middle. But I put it to you that our obsession with picking the extreme and laughing at moderation is little more than cope. It’s our obsession with tribalism, with extremism, with feeling over thinking, with belonging over being. It’s destructive, unhelpful, and soul-destroying.”
“The middle path is the exhausting work of noticing – today, in this hour, in this moment, in this body, in this season of your life and your work – what moderation actually means; knowing the answer may be different next month, and knowing the responsibility for that moderation is yours and yours alone. There is no tribe that can make your decisions for you and make them easier to live with; no ideology that can forgive your sins or blame your failings on someone else’s flaws. The right amount of anything is a moving target that you have to find for yourself, again and again.”
Why I Stopped Arguing With People
A Geek’s Page https://wangcong.org/2026-06-30-why-i-stopped-arguing-with-people.html
“Many people are ego-driven. Their opinions aren’t positions they hold; they are the position. Prove the idea wrong and you haven’t corrected a fact, you’ve attacked a person. So they defend it the way anyone defends themselves: not with reason, but with resistance. The stronger your argument, the harder they dig in.
You can’t win an argument like this, because it was never an argument. It was a fight over whose ego stays intact. Even when you “win,” you lose, because now you have an enemy who is more convinced than before.
So I’ve drawn a line. I only discuss pros and cons with smart people; I don’t argue right and wrong with ego-driven ones. With the first kind, a disagreement is a joint search for the better answer, and both of us walk away sharper. With the second, there is no answer being sought, only a self to be defended”
“We like to believe humans are rational animals who occasionally feel emotions. It’s the reverse. We are emotional animals who occasionally think.”
“If the only person you can change is yourself, then the one question that matters is: how do you actually get better? Not by winning arguments. You get better by asking others for feedback, again and again, and truly listening to it. It’s the same asking I described earlier, the one clean exception, now turned on myself: I’m the one requesting help, so the advice can finally land. And you cannot do that with an ego in the way. The ego that needs to win is the same ego that can’t hear. It’s not just harmful; it’s a disaster, to everyone around you and to yourself most of all, because it quietly walls you off from the one thing that would improve you.”
from Routine Revelations https://ift.tt/jZbVEKP
via IFTTT
Notes From The Cave 