my favorite mistake
Oct. 27th, 2008 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfieldThe 6 Mistakes of Man:
1) The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others.
2) The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
3) Insisting that a thing is impossible because we ourselves cannot accomplish it.
4) Refusing to set aside trivial differences.
5) Neglecting development and refinement of mind, and not acquiring habits of reading and studying.
6) Attempting to compel other people to believe and live as we do.
- Cicero
My old friend Charlie Garbowski led me to the quotation above -- back in ninth grade, if I remember correctly -- between him lecturing me about moral values and commiserating with me about our inability to transgress them. Normally I abbreviate/anonymize names like that, but I lost touch with ol' Charlie years ago, and it would be good to know what he's up to these days.
Looking at Cicero's list of mistakes, I can think of numerous instances of personal failure in each case. Of those mistakes, though, I think I'm probably weakest in terms of No. 4. It wasn't long ago that I was soft on No. 2, but I think I licked that somewhere in the past five years or so. Nos. 3 and 5 are mistakes of the immature, and Nos. 1 and 6 are mistakes of the cynical.
I'm not sure where "absent-mindedly leaving the toilet seat up" fits in among these categories, or for that matter "believing that there is a finite taxonomy for sorting the mistakes of humanity," but I guess nobody's perfect.
1) The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others.
2) The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
3) Insisting that a thing is impossible because we ourselves cannot accomplish it.
4) Refusing to set aside trivial differences.
5) Neglecting development and refinement of mind, and not acquiring habits of reading and studying.
6) Attempting to compel other people to believe and live as we do.
- Cicero
My old friend Charlie Garbowski led me to the quotation above -- back in ninth grade, if I remember correctly -- between him lecturing me about moral values and commiserating with me about our inability to transgress them. Normally I abbreviate/anonymize names like that, but I lost touch with ol' Charlie years ago, and it would be good to know what he's up to these days.
Looking at Cicero's list of mistakes, I can think of numerous instances of personal failure in each case. Of those mistakes, though, I think I'm probably weakest in terms of No. 4. It wasn't long ago that I was soft on No. 2, but I think I licked that somewhere in the past five years or so. Nos. 3 and 5 are mistakes of the immature, and Nos. 1 and 6 are mistakes of the cynical.
I'm not sure where "absent-mindedly leaving the toilet seat up" fits in among these categories, or for that matter "believing that there is a finite taxonomy for sorting the mistakes of humanity," but I guess nobody's perfect.
