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The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff

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CollectionsYour library (615), To read (2), All collections (615)

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Tagsfiction (207), American (130), philosophy (101), English (86), American fiction (77), 20th century (64), poetry (56), English fiction (50), nonfiction (50), German (48) — see all tags

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About meI graduated from law school in 2007, after a long, meandering, procrastination-induced voyage through graduate school in economics. I'm now working as an attorney in Denver, raising two amazing daughters, and spending every free moment I can at our house in the mountains, so I'm not doing much pleasure reading. All I ever really wanted to do, though, was walk around the Painted Stoa having discussions about aesthetics and metaphysics.

"Dilettanti, dilettanti! This is the slighting way in which those who pursue any branch of art or learning for the love and enjoyment of the thing,---per il loro diletto, are spoken of by those who have taken it up for the sake of gain, attracted solely by the prospect of money. This contempt of theirs comes from the base belief that no man will seriously devote himself to a subject, unless he is spurred on to it by want, hunger, or else some form of greed. The public is of the same way of thinking; and hence its general respect for professionals and its distrust of dilettanti. But the truth is that the dilettante treats his subject as an end, whereas the professional, pure and simple, treats it merely as a means. He alone will be really in earnest about the matter, who has a direct interest therein, takes to it because he likes it, and pursues it con amore."

---Schopenhauer, "On Men of Learning"

About my libraryA little of this, a little of that. I like everything from Lemony Snicket to Chamfort to Schopenhauer to Baudelaire to Swinburne to O'Neill...

GroupsColorado Bibliophiles, Combiners!, Lawyers, Metafilter, Philosophy and Theory, Tea!

Favorite authorsLloyd Alexander, Aristophanes, Charles Baudelaire, Ambrose Bierce, Anne Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Anton Chekhov, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Diogenes Laertius, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Frank, Sigmund Freud, Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse, Immanuel Kant, Milan Kundera, Halldór Laxness, Lucian, H. L. Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Prosper Mérimée, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eugene O'Neill, George Orwell, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Philip Pullman, François de La Rochefoucauld, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Bernard Shaw, Lemony Snicket, C.P. Snow, Stendhal, Laurence Sterne, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Shared favorites)