Topic
Risk is not recklessness — that distinction runs through most of this collection. Franklin's preparation aphorism ("by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail") sits alongside Will Rogers on the right track and getting run over anyway if you stand still. The quotes on marriage appear here because Victorian and Edwardian writers saw marriage as one of the great gambles of a life, and Wilde's calculation of the odds is still sharp: demoralizing and expensive, but people keep making the bet. Franklin again, on marrying for love being honest enough that God smiles on it, offers the counterweight. Rogers on the stock market makes the whole enterprise absurd with the precision of perfect logic. Schweitzer's warning — that man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall, and will end by destroying the earth — lifts the stakes from personal to planetary. This is not a collection that tells you to take risks. It is one that tries to distinguish between the risks worth taking and those that merely look like courage.