Tricky Wise Quotes

Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.

Do not oversleep and miss the school bus- you'll be late. That's a habit teachers generally don't appreciate. Never tell your friends at school that you still wet your bed. They are sure to tease you, and you'll wish that you were dead. Never call your teacher a name when she's not near you. Teachers' ears are excellent, so they can always hear you. Do not read a textbook when your hands aren't clean-it's tricky to separate the pages when the pages get real sticky. When you go out for a team it's always wise to practice. When you are a substitute, the bench can feel like cactus. Do not copy homework from a friend who is a dummy. If you do, I'm sure that you will get a grade that's crummy. And if your report card's bad, don't blame it on your buddy. Kiss up to your parents quick, or they might make you study.

Narrow behaviourist thinking permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the childrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a full understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causes are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings, without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are often the active representations of emotional states and of special kinds of brain functioning. As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment. Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive to change not them but their environments. These are the only things we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much that we can do.

In the end, we are all existential pathfinders: We select among the paths life affords, and then, when those paths no longer work for us, we edit them and innovate as necessary. The tricky part is that while we are editing our trails, our trails are also editing us. I witnessed this phenomenon firsthand on the Appalachian Trail. The trail was modified with each step we hikers took, but ultimately, the trail steered our course. By following it, we streamlined to its conditions: we lost weight, shed possessions, and increased our pace week after week. The same rule applies to our life’s pathways: collectively we shape them, but individually they shape us. So we must choose our paths wisely.

The simplest thing to do with pain is to deceive yourself into thinking it offers you an opportunity: by making it into a game, it becomes less by which you suffer. By playing with it, you can turn it into the category of things you pick up, and can therefore put down. Thinking about your pain puts it in the category of the imaginary. But pain is not imaginary. It is wrong to think that the thoughtful escape it, or the very tricky, or the very wise. Those who skip town do not escape it, and those who skip between lovers do not. Drinking is no escape; gratitude lists are not. When you stop making a project of trying to escape your pain, it will still be there, but also a realization: that the pain is only as much as you can handle - like a glass of water filled to the brim, the water hovering at the meniscus, not running over.

Discretion: "Responsible diplomats will always be guarded in what they say to each other. They know that the constant application of discretion precludes neither cordial personal relations nor many mutual useful exchanges with competent colleagues. Rather than being put off when they encounter this quality in others, they take it as reassuring evidence that they are dealing with reliable and useful professionals. If this quality is not present, a wise diplomat will be warned off, and will take his dealings elsewhere." — William Macomber, 1975 Dishonesty: "A reputation for trickiness will follow a diplomat around the globe as tenaciously as the dossiers prepared by his diplomatic colleagues pursue him from post to post." — Charles Thayer, 1959 Dissent: There is always a danger that the message will be mistaken for the messenger. Dissent is often taken for insult, as it implicitly condemns the judgment of those with whose policies it takes issue. The ultimate test of an ambassador's persuasiveness is to report and recommend honestly on the lapses and errors of his own country's policies without fatally offending those guilty of them. Dissent: "There are strict limits, dictated by common sense and the realities of the situation, to how far an ambassador can go in opposing a position of his own government. If a compromise is not possible and once the final decision has been made, he must of course loyally and scrupulously implement it even if it goes against what he had recommended. But until the final decision is made an ambassador owes his government the frankest and most unvarnished advice." — François de Laboulaye and Jean Laloy, 1983