Maxims: fifteen years of reading, shared
For about fifteen years, whenever a sentence in a book stopped me, I wrote it down. The pile kept growing, and this year I finally sat down and put it in order. It became a small book called Maxims, and I'd like to share it. It's free, like everything I do outside of work.
For about fifteen years, whenever a sentence in a book stopped me, I wrote it down. The pile kept growing, and this year I finally sat down and put it in order. It became a small book called Maxims, and I'd like to share it. It's free, like everything I do outside of work.
There's no pretension here. I'm not a scholar and I didn't discover anything. It's simply what I managed to gather from my reading over these years, organized so that someone else can enjoy it too: 411 maxims from 155 authors, in alphabetical order, from Adyashanti to the Zohar. Philosophers, poets, novelists, filmmakers, saints and a few heretics. Saint Augustine ends up a few pages away from Bukowski, and Seneca shares the book with Kubrick, Clarice Lispector, Simone Weil and Fernando Pessoa. I like that kind of company.
I put it together in Portuguese first, and the English edition took some extra care. Authors who wrote in English appear in their own words, not translated back from Portuguese. Quotes I couldn't trace to a real source were left out, and the few whose attribution I couldn't fully confirm are marked as such.
Toward the end there are some things of my own: a short section of sentences I wrote over the years, and 46 texts, poems, letters and reflections written between 2022 and 2026. They're closer to notes in the margin than to literature, but they came out of the same reading, so they stayed. Three of the short ones:
The bird is free in the prison of the air. The spirit is free in the prison of the body.
I don't like anything shallow, ankle-deep water. Either I dive until I find the sunken kingdom of Atlantis, or I stay on the shore, watching from outside.
Fight, and fight again. Until the lamb becomes a lion.
The pages are illustrated with eleven public domain paintings of the night, by Van Gogh, Caspar David Friedrich, Böcklin and Whistler, plus Gustave Doré's engraving for Poe's "The Raven". Poe is one of the writers I owe the most, together with Augusto dos Anjos, Álvares de Azevedo and David Foster Wallace. A lot of what's in this book passed through them first.
If you decide to open it, my only suggestion is to go slowly. It works better one maxim at a time: read one, think about it for a while, come back another day. If a single line helps you through a hard day or makes you look at something differently, that's more than enough for me.
The book is dedicated to my mother, Soraya Murad, who encouraged me in my wildest dreams and in my reading, and to my cousin Filipe Nacle Gannam, a man of excellent taste and memory.
Download Maxims (PDF, about 14 MB)
And if one of these sentences stays with you, I'd be glad to hear which one.