"A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body." ~ Benjamin Franklin Of the things that you do at home, how many are truly enriching versus simply entertaining? Entertainment options have proliferated over the last few decades. Cable and satellite television. The internet. iPhone, …
Tag: gregory hake
Uncorrupted Reason
I came across a remarkable collection of works produced by Thomas Cole, the English-born American artist who is credited with founding the Hudson River School. Cole possessed an uncommon ability to capture broad strokes of history in his landscapes. Cole aimed to produce a "higher style of landscape" imbued with romanticism and naturalism unparalleled in …
Dead Symbols
I am reading a book recommended by a friend called "The Culture of Classicism", written by history professor Caroline Winterer. The author notes that the book "charts how Americans over the course of the 19th century fundamentally changed their relationship with classical antiquity, seeking in the remote past new guides for modern life." The late …
What is education?
"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life." ~ Plato The transition into the 20th century was a watershed event for both medicine and education. Over the course of a few decades, medical education and the system of primary and secondary education employed in our nation relinquished their classical …
Pathological Disbelief and Intellectual Terror
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the most discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny..." ~ Isaac Asimov One of the great obstacles to progress in scientific understanding was well described by Nobel Prize-winning Cambridge emeritus professor Brian Josephson as "pathological disbelief." Josephson used the term …
Continue reading Pathological Disbelief and Intellectual Terror
Stop and Hear the Music
A friend of mine brought the following story to my attention the other day and I am so excited to share it with you this morning. A number of articles were written on an experiment that took place several years ago in Washington, but this article from the Huffington Post is particularly cogent to our …
The Best of Every Man
"I have believed the best of every man. And find that to believe is enough to make a bad man show him at his best, or even a good man swings his lantern higher." ~ William Butler Yeats You are making a grave error if you love your friends and hate your enemies. Both love …
Comfortably Numb
I heard Pink Floyd's song, Comfortably Numb, yesterday, which apparently is an autobiographical tale of Roger Water's childhood experience with a high fever that made him delirious, giving him the sensation of being dissociated from his body. He had the same feeling at different points in his adult life, including a bout of hepatitis while …
The Happiness of your Life
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature." ~ Marcus Aelius Aurelius The quality of your thoughts is the one thing you have control over at the end of the day. The world around …
The New Life
La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri In that book which is My memory . . . On the first page That is the chapter when I first met you Appear the words . . . Here begins a new life If you are looking to do something meaningful in life, look first to be an …
Gregory Hake 