Join 📚 Roger's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what roger's read, .

As I have said, that vast plot of Tennessee land * was held by my father twenty years—intact. When he died in 1847, we began to manage it ourselves. Forty years afterward, we had managed it all away except 10,000 acres, and gotten nothing to remember the sales by. About 1887—possibly it was earlier—the 10,000 went. My brother found a chance to trade it for a house and lot in the town of Corry, in the oil regions of Pennsylvania. About 1894 he sold this property for $250. That ended the Tennessee Land. If any penny of cash ever came out of my father’s wise investment but that, I have no recollection of it. No, I am overlooking a detail. It furnished me a field for Sellers and a book. Out of my half of the book I got $15,000 or $20,000; out of the play I got $75,000 or $80,000—just about a dollar an acre. It is curious: I was not alive when my father made the investment, therefore he was not intending any partiality; yet I was the only member of the family that ever profited by it. I shall have occasion to mention this land again, now and then, as I go along, for it influenced our life in one way or another during more than a generation. Whenever things grew dark it rose and put out its hopeful Sellers hand and cheered us up, and said “Do not be afraid—trust in me—wait.” It kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years, and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers, and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1

Mark Twain, Harriet E. Smith, Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Sharon K. Goetz, a...

The avoidance of our mortal, transient condition is pathological. To be mindful of our fragile fate each day, in a non-morbid acknowledgement, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not. It has been my experience that those who handle aging and mortality least well are those who fear that they have not been in this life, that they have not been here, that they have not lived the life they were called to live. ~ Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, p. 209

The Best of James Hollis

Logan Jones

A human being who finds himself stuck at some boring meeting or cocktail party often finds it difficult to invent an excuse to flee. Amos’s rule, whenever he wanted to leave any gathering, was to just get up and leave. Just start walking and you’ll be surprised how creative you will become and how fast you’ll find the words for your excuse, he said. His attitude to the clutter of daily life was of a piece with his strategy for dealing with social demands. Unless you are kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away, you are not throwing enough away, he said.

The Undoing Project

Michael Lewis

...catch up on these, and many more highlights