Metadata
- Author: Edward Packard
- Full Title:: Nine Things I Learned In Ninety Years
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://edwardpackard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Nine-Things-I-Learned-in-Ninety-Years.pdf
- Read date:: 2025-09-24
Highlights
That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-24
- to be self-constituted (View Highlight)
In her book Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (2009) Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard draws on Kant’s and Aristotle’s philosophy to make a case for self-constitution — being “consistent, unified, and whole”–– having “integrity.” (View Highlight)
Otherwise, you’ll be ruled by a heap of impulses (View Highlight)
- to keep awake and aware (View Highlight)
Sleepwalking is an all too accessible alternative to confronting inconvenient facts (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-25
- to consider what others may be thinking and feeling (View Highlight)
Littered among my memories like pieces of trash along a trail are occasions when I said something that worked to my disadvantage even though I had supposed that it would impress, or persuade, or engender respect for me on the part of the person I addressed it to. Belatedly, I became aware that decisions involving interactions with others should be informed by reflecting on what whomever you’re interacting with may think and feel in response to what you say and do (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-26
another post by the Dalai Lama: Even more important than the warmth and affection we receive, is the warmth and affection we give… . More important than being loved, therefore, is to love (View Highlight)
- to seek an eternal perspective (View Highlight)
“compassion without attachment, (View Highlight)
if you are emotionally disengaged, doesn’t it drain the excitement out of life? Aren’t you less likely to be satisfied? Not necessarily (View Highlight)
New highlights added 2025-09-30
- to guard against self-deception (View Highlight)
Certitude is not the test of certainty. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) (View Highlight)
People who are brilliant and highly educated can be as vulnerable to self-deception as anyone. They employ their superior intellectual capability to display a virtuosity of sophistry most of us could never attain. (View Highlight)
The best way to overcome the fear of death — so at least it seems to me — is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) (View Highlight)
- what an outsized role is played by luck; (View Highlight)
It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve. (View Highlight)
- to consider what you have at the moment. (View Highlight)