Feeling Stressed Today? Take Some Advice from Herodotus

"People with bows string them when they need to use them and unstring them when they've finished with them. If they kept them strung all the time, the bows would break, and then they wouldn't be able to use them when they needed them. It is no different with people's temperments. Anyone who is serious all the time and never allows himself a fair measure of relaxation will imperceptibly slide into madness or have a stroke." --Amasis, king of Egypt, in Herodotus' The Histories

Commonplace Books

The Lyceum: "Commonplacing is the act of selecting important phrases, lines, and/or passages from texts and writing them down; the commonplace book is the notebook in which a reader has collected quotations from works s/he has read. Commonplace books can also include comments and notes from the reader; they are frequently indexed so that the reader can classify important themes and locate quotations related to particular topics or authors." I've kept a commonplace book for about fifteen years. First I used a special notebook, but now I just keep it on my computer. Here are a couple of lines I've recorded over the years: It is as possible for a man to know something without having been at school as it is to have been at school and to know nothing! Henry Fielding from Tom Jones …if everyone in the world were to bring his own problems along to market with the intention of trading with his neighbors, a glimpse of his neighbors' problems would make him glad to take back home the ones he came with. Herodotus from The Histories