“Our friends show us what we can do, our enemies teach us what we must do.” – Johann Goethe
Explain this one to me. I mean all of you, pipe in, tell me what you think it means. I liked it when I set it on paper, but I haven’t quite ever understood it to my satisfaction.
Drawing © 2016 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
“Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody.” – Henry David Thoreau
I am not sure if this makes sense to me. How does it make sense to you, or does it?
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
“It is the mission of history to make our fellow beings acceptable to us.” Jose Ortega Y Gasset
I think most people don’t realize how different our ‘history’ is now that we have an omnivorous media and access to so many documents we didn’t use to have. Now we can write histories that make people and actions in the past not look acceptable at all. But that wasn’t how it always was.
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
“Good teaching is 1/4 preparation and 3/4 theatre” – Goodwin
I taught drawing at the college level for 9 years. I came to understand that what the students don’t know, they don’t know. In other words, they do not know about your decision making, they don’t know about what you are leaving out, they don’t know about your confusion. All they know is your presentation. This is true of any public speaking.
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
I remember being illuminated at one time by the idea that we are not only liberated by an idea, but that the very act of verbalizing the idea is the act of building a series of walls, within which we then must live.
Religion of course is a prime example of that. Trying to define God, Heaven, Love, Salvation, etc. allows us to contemplate the infinite, but those same definitions creates a finite limit to the ideas.
“We are imprisoned by facts.”
“Unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.”
So, if this is the case, what are your unbeliefs? And once you tell us that, how did your beliefs, blind or otherwise, create those unbeliefs? Or, maybe you don’t believe this quote about unbelief?
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Quote by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-1799, German physicist
“Truth is rarely pure and never simple.” – Oscar Wilde
I have come to see truth as a useful construction for most people. That doesn’t mean the ‘truth’ they believe isn’t true, it means their reasons for believing it have less to do with it’s truth and more to do with the believer’s needs. The believer wants things to match their world and so constructing a truth that validates that world is very helpful.
But equally interesting is the phenomenon of when a person turns their own world upside down, converts to a new ‘truth’, abandons an old one, rejects prior reasons something was ‘true’. That destruction, or deconstruction, is simply a process by which one ‘truth’ that no longer fits their needs is jettisoned and a new ‘truth’, one closer to reality maybe, maybe not, is found to replace the fallen ‘truth’.
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
This is very, VERY true! Do you want to be heard, your opinions and ideas and feelings listened to? Then be patient and listen to others. Find your way through their thoughts and yours will come out as well. If they don’t let you come out, maybe it’s time to find some new conversationalist friends.
“The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation, not overturning it.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
There is something in me that feels crass and guilty about having success in something. Why is that? Do you feel that too?
“It is an unhealthy attitude to think success a trivial incident in life.”
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Is there a God we should fear? Why is that? What is up with the scripture quote ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom?
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
“They that worship God from fear would worship the Devil if he appeared.” – Thomas Fuller
