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

In every sense, much of what we get, we don’t deserve.

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

Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality.

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

‘If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life,’

Then there are friendships that are really strategic acquaintances, where people take pleasure in each other’s company only in so far as they have hopes of taking advantage of it.

‘What need is there to weep over parts of life?’ asked Seneca. ‘The whole of it calls for tears.’

In other words, only naive (but perhaps rather touching) narcissism would lead someone at once to believe in a God who made the eternal laws of physics and then to imagine that this same God would take an interest in bending the rules of existence to improve his or her life in some way.

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.