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

down-to-earth

when we have enough freedom to realise we’re in a cage, but not quite enough freedom to escape it

Psychotherapy should, for example, rightly be one of the gargantuan industries of the later 21st century.

‘The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.’

He observed that humans have many ‘higher’ needs that are in fact very sensible and good, and yet that currently lie outside of capitalist enterprise: among these, our need for education, for self-understanding, for beautiful cities and for rewarding social lives.

‘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,

all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. It’s merely the economy that – for its own greedy ends – pushes us to sacrifice ourselves to one discipline alone, rendering us (in Marx’s words) ‘one-sided and dependent’ and ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.’ It was in the Manuscripts of 18