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

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

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

If we’re ever to replace traditional beliefs, we must remember just how much religion is helped along by ritual, tradition, art and a desire to belong – all things that Spinoza, despite his great wisdom, ignored at his peril in his bold attempt to replace the Bible.

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

‘To reduce your worry, you must assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.’

There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

It’s only when we realise that other people cannot save us from das Nichts that we’re likely to stop living for them; to stop worrying so much about what others think, and to cease giving up the lion’s share of our lives and energies to impress people who never really liked us in the first place.

Plato sees art as therapeutic: it is the duty of poets and painters (and, nowadays, novelists, television producers and designers) to help us lead good lives.

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 …