Stout Wisdom

…Uncle Sam is the drunk and the tea partiers are the annoyingly sober — and a bit self-righteous — cousin.

Weighing benefits against costs is the way most people make decisions — and the way most businesses make decisions, if they want to stay in business. Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.

“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

Repentance is taking God’s position against our own.

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.

Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

…leave out the parts that readers tend to skip….Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue. My most important rule is one that sums up the 10. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and they will jump overboard to get away.

…it’s rare to find a consistently creative or insightful person who is also an angry person. They can’t occupy the same space, and if your anger moves in, generosity and creativity often move out. It’s difficult to use revenge or animus to fuel great work.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’

“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”

“An idol is a good thing made into an ultimate thing.”

“Italians come to ruin most generally in three ways, women, gambling, and farming. My family chose the slowest one.”