We lament the fools we were, but not the fools we are.
From Taking Everything into Account, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
Switch spent most of the afternoon telling me about the acorn he buried last fall under the wrong fence post, and how stupid he had been, and how he would never do such a thing again. He said all of this while burying an acorn under the same fence post. I did not point it out. For a long time I thought this was a squirrel failing, the short memory, the loop; I have since watched a man on the bench by the elms laugh about the job he quit in 1989 and then take a call he clearly did not want to take. We lament the fools we were, but not the fools we are. The one we are has not finished yet, I suppose, and it is hard to grieve something still in progress.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
Have it on something
More like it
- A know-it-all doesn’t and doesn’t know that he doesn’t.
- We have learned so much about how to make a better world, but not learned enough.
- The beginning of naming is the end of knowing.
- Call it what you will, it will be what it is.
- Life does not come with captions for a reason.
- History is a pendulum in the shape of a mallet.