The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.

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.

If one were to judge of love according to the greatest part of the effects it produces, it might very justly pass for hatred rather than kindness. To say that one never flirts is in itself a form of flirtation.

‘Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’

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.

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

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

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 …

provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal