Always remember that melancholy is caused by a humor.
E.g.:

"True happiness is an illusion. Fortunately, most happiness is fake."

The poet receives inspiration.

The philosopher endures existence.

The philosopher's obsession
with existence resembles
the poet's possession
by inspiration. For both

it is a matter of sitting:
the philosopher must sit and face
what is, while the poet has to
sit and hold what is to come.

Thus their labors are divided
between one's earnest being
and another's sly becoming,
between the essence of the thing

and the emergence of the people,
brought together in imagination.

A story, said Hemingway, is a sequence of fact and motion.
Perhaps an argument is a consort of act and grasping.

To know how to act is to have power.
Knowledge is a mastery of facts.

The philosopher is inspired by the brute fact of existence.

The poet exists for the pure act of inspiration.

I may have to correct my thinking on discipline. Perhaps discipline is to power as intelligence is to knowledge. Cf. "Study & Strive", "Discipline and Freedom", and "Pangrammatical Laces"

I am literally looking for the spot where existence touches inspiration. I must find its figure in time.

It was his tenuous hold on his existence that made him a philosopher, always tentatively groping in the dark for concepts with which to grasp the reality.

Ever attentive to her inspiration, by contrast, she was a poet, tensely straining at her bonds with an emotion that seized her ideally.

The wisdom of the poet
must never become apparent,
as the philosopher's love
must stay below the surface.

Poets do not tell us how they feel;
they show us what our words can do.
Philosophers don't tell us what they think;
they make us see what words must be.

Do not try to get them to believe what you feel; just let them know what you think.

Many of the things you know are compatible with beliefs you eschew.

Many of the people you master are amenable to desires you despise.