Can one sentence sum up your personal philosophy?

@Carla What does that mean?

@Carla why would that startle you?

@Smidke an old painter once told me that.

If you are going to do something, anything...don't be timid about it.

@Smidke I think he's saying that life will have no effect on our fate after death, but the prospect of death has an enormous effect on our lives.

This is from [i]Respondez[/i] which is full of ironic observations like this one. In my opinion, Whitman's best poem, which he left out of later editions of [i]Leaves of Grass[/i].

@LeopoldBloom Well we all die, no one lives forever, but it is how you live that resounds through eternity, they say!

@Smidke Our lives can certainly have an effect on others after we're gone, but there's no evidence they have any effect on us when we're dead.

@Smidke Jesus stole it from Hillel, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others.”

@Smidke @LeopoldBloom Technically correct, that the precise wording I used was how Jesus phrased it. But the actual philosophical statement in various iterations goes back centuries before him through the Old Testament, Zoroastro, even to Socrates. While there are differences of opinion regarding Confucious, he is often credited with the statement 'What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.''

@dancingtongue Hillel wouldn't have known about Confucius, but Jesus would have known about Hillel. He flipped it from Hillel's negative injunction to a positive one.

The negative one is straightforward. I don't want people to punch me, so I won't punch them. The positive one is more ambiguous. I want every beautiful woman I see to have sex with me, so "do unto others" means I should have sex with them.