Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
Interpretation
Embracing ignorance can provide a clearer perspective on the bigger picture.
This quote suggests that sometimes, not overanalyzing or overthinking a situation allows one to gain a better understanding of its essence. By focusing on the broader context without getting lost in the details, we can make clearer judgments and decisions.
In practice
In a meeting discussing project management, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of prioritizing overarching goals over minor details.
I think one of the main reasons I write is to do better than ranting. The ranting is the opinion, and the writing is not the opinion. I always say that people's opinions are the worst things about them. The words demand a dignity.
How do you explain to somebody who doesn't understand that you don't build a library to read. A library is a resource. Something you go to, for reference, as and when. But also something you simply look at, because it gives you succour, answers to some idea of who you are or, more to the point, who you would like to be, who you will be once you own every book you need to own.
It is no judgement of a thing outside yourself to say it makes you ill. The wise reader knows that every pronouncement is, to some degree, an act of self-exposure; the book you find too challenging might only show how ill-equipped you are to face its challenge.
In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.
For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.
It isn't only in the name of free speech that the views of an itchy polemicist should be tolerated - and I say itchy polemicist promoting thought, not itchy ideologue promoting violence - but because provocation is indispensable to the workings of a sound, creative culture.
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet - because it is the purpose of humanity.
What is required is sight and insight- then you might add one more: excite.
I've always been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, who articulated his Dream of an America where people are judged not by skin color but "by the content of their character." In the scientific world, people are judged by the content of their ideas. Advances are made with new insights, but the final arbitrator of any point of view are experiments that seek the unbiased truth, not information cherry picked to support a particular point of view.
I'm 57, I can't look like a 30-year-old. You try to hold age at bay, but there comes a point when you just have to give up gracefully.
Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you
Be warned against all 'good' advice because 'good' advice is necessarily 'safe' advice, and though it will undoubtedly follow a sane pattern, it will very likely lead one into total sterility--one of the crushing problems of our time.
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