Wisdom from "The Rule of Four"

My friend and colleague Caroline recently recommended a book to me, entitled "The Rule of Four", by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. Think a deeper, more interesting, less plodding and overtly religious "DaVinci Code"...it's about a group of students and their struggles finding the hidden meaning(s) of an ancient book that has flummoxed scholars since its publication over 500 years prior. This book has everything...many words of wisdom, great friendships, a good love story, solid scholarship, and plenty of quality plot twists. Admittedly, my eyes began to glaze over when they were talking about hieroglyphics, ancient languages, and some of the advanced mathematics, but not enough to distract from a fantastic book that I would recommend to anyone. I've posted below some of the best quotes from the book, so enjoy!

"A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves most in the world will misunderstand him.

Time weighs most on those who have it least...nothing is lighter than being young with the world on your shoulders; it gives you a feeling of possibility so seductive, you know there must be something more important you could be doing than studying for exams.

People say to victims that time is a great healer, but I have a different impression. Time disperses us, it's the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush, and we're the paint.

A pact made in passion is the only good excuse for bad judgment.

His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn't control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, and errors in interpretation, even in subjects far from his own. The more he fed his destructive mind, the more it grew, leaving nothing behind. When it had burned everything in its path, the only thing left for it to do was to turn on itself.

Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice age set in.

Never invest yourself in anything so completely that its failure could cost you your happiness.

A good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask...a great friend does it without being asked.

The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.

Hope whispered forth from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows escaped...it's both the last and best of things. Without it, there is only time, and time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away until it nudges us into oblivion. Like all things in the universe, we are destined to diverge, and time is simply the yardstick of our separation. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Every desire has its proper object. People spend their entire lives wanting things they shouldn't, and the world confuses them into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn't belong. All it takes to be happy is to love the right things in the right amounts.

Seeing her take off that sweater to reveal a black bra underneath, seeing the way it left her hair mussed, strands of hair floating in a halo of static electricity gave me a feeling that a sensational future had finally pressed itself up against a hopeful present, throwing the switch that completes the circuit of time.

The adventure of our first days soon blossomed into something else, a feeling I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

The delicious futility of impossible tasks is the catnip of overachievers.

The tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one. Love draws lines between us like an astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature. The butt of every triangle becomes the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tessellation of love affairs. Taken together, they have the pattern of netting, and behind them is Love. Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net from which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping someday to tell stories about the one that got away.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age, which are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity...wait long enough and anything will realize its potential. It's simply not given to us in one lifetime to see those consummations, so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

The present is simply a reflection of the future. Imagine that we spend our whole lives staring into a mirror with the future at our backs, seeing it only in the reflection of what is here and now. Some of us would begin to believe that we could see tomorrow better by turning around to look at it directly. But those who did, without realizing it, would have lost the key to the perspective they once had. For one thing, they would never be able to see it in themselves. By turning their backs on the mirror, they would become the one element of the future their eyes could never find.

My heart is a bird in a cage, ruffling its wings with the ache of expectation."