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October 7, 2007
let us live cheerfully
Let us live cheerfully, although there be no lasting joy in mortal things, whose substance is evanescent, inane, and vacuous. But if there is any good thing by which you would adorn this stage of life, we have not of such been cheated – rest, serenity, modesty, self-restraint, orderliness, change, fun, entertainment, society, temperance, sleep, food, drink, riding, sailing, walking, keeping abreast of events, meditation, contemplation, education, piety, marriage, feasting, the satisfaction of recalling an orderly disposition of the past, cleanness, water, fire, listening to music, looking at all about one, talks, stories, history, liberty, continence, little birds, puppies, cats, consolation of death, and the common flux of time, fate, and fortune, over the afflicted and favored alike. There is a good in the hope for things beyond all hope; good in the exercise of some art in which one is skilled; good in meditation upon the manifold transmutation of all nature and upon the magnitude of earth.
If free choice of place should be given me, then, I should move my abode to Aquileia or Porto Venere as delightful places to live; or outside Italy, I should choose Eryx in Sicily or Dieppe on the Dieppe River, or Tempe’s Vale in Thessaly. For my age does not carry me as far as Cyrene’s shores, nor to Mount Zion in Judea; nor does it urge me to seek Ceylon’s Isle near India. These regions may bear happy men; they cannot make men happy.
Cardan - Book of My Life
Posted by amin at October 7, 2007 12:11 PM