Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today (The School of Life Library)

provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal

Plato proposed that our lives go wrong in large part because we almost never give ourselves time to think carefully and logically enough about our plans.

He that refuses praise the first time it is offered does it because he would like to hear it a second.

‘anguish’ of existence. Everything is (terrifyingly) possible because nothing has any preordained, God-given sense or purpose.

a Sartrean would strip away the surface normality to show the radical strangeness lurking beneath. Dinner really means that when your part of the planet has spun away from the energy of a distant hydrogen and helium explosion, you slide your knees under strips of a chopped-up tree and put sections of dead animals and plants in your mouth and chew,

In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from Uneigentlichkeit to Eigentlichkeit (from Inauthenticity to Authenticity). We will, in essence, start to live for ourselves.

The task of art, as Aristotle saw it, is to make profound truths about life stick in our minds.

to teach people how to be calm and brave in the face of overwhelming anxiety and pain.

What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other … You have a choice in life: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys …