BRIEF
Daily brief - Sun May 31 2026
What does this passage say you should defend with your life, and which of your daily acts contradicts that defence?
Theme: core_values · card 1/4 · 2026-05-31
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor. The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so rich in inward.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
Notes go here when you tap capture or note above.
What recurring behaviour is the passage describing? What is your version of it?
Theme: patterns · card 2/4 · 2026-05-31
“Caedimur et totidem plagis consumimus hostem;” [“We are slain, and with as many blows kill the enemy” (or), “It is a fight wherein we exhaust each other by mutual wounds.” --Horace, Epist., ii. 2, 97.] the reasons have little other foundation than experience, and the variety of human events presenting us with infinite examples of all sorts of forms. An understanding person of our times says: That whoever would, in contradiction to our almanacs, write cold where they say hot, and wet where they say dry, and always put the contrary to what they foretell; if he were to lay a wager, he would not care which side he took, excepting where no uncertainty could fall out, as to promise excessive heats at Christmas, or extremity of cold at Midsummer.
— Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne (Complete)
Notes go here when you tap capture or note above.
Which activity drains you that the writer of this passage would refuse to do at all?
Theme: energy · card 3/4 · 2026-05-31
Those kings may well put on a good air before us still: for that have THEY learned best of us all at present! Had they however no one to see them, I wager that with them also the bad game would again commence,— —The bad game of drifting clouds, of damp melancholy, of curtained heavens, of stolen suns, of howling autumn-winds,
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Notes go here when you tap capture or note above.
Which hour of yesterday would the writer of this passage be unable to forgive you for?
Theme: time · card 4/4 · 2026-05-31
For the sense of the flesh is slow, because it is the sense of the flesh; and thereby is it bounded. It sufficeth for that it was made for; but it sufficeth not to stay things running their course from their appointed starting-place to the end appointed. For in Thy Word, by which they are created, they hear their decree, "hence and hitherto."
— Saint Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine
Notes go here when you tap capture or note above.