“… so the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

Why we carry this line

Wisdom in knowing what to leave out — that one got me. Raise your hand if you can think of multiple times using that simple concept would have been the better option. Moved to the must-have quote list. And purchased the t-shirt.

The design

The ensō tee and the journal carry an ensō: a circle drawn in a single brushstroke, with no corrections. It sits above the line and stays open. A closed circle contains. An open one lets things through, and James’s line asks the same question: what do you let through, and what do you let go?

The kintsugi tee takes a different route. A jagged seam in warm matte gold, after the Japanese craft of mending a break so it shows, runs exactly between “is the art of knowing” and “what to overlook.” That’s the hinge of James’s sentence. The seam leaves a wider gap there than anywhere else on the shirt, a beat to decide what to let go. That’s ma, the Japanese idea that the pause between things is part of the design.

What happened next

The Principles of Psychology took James twelve years to write. When he sent the manuscript to his publisher, he did not celebrate.

“No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book,” he wrote. “No subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages.” He called it “a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass.”

The man who wrote that wisdom is knowing what to overlook couldn’t overlook a thing. The book came out in 1890, in two volumes.