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

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

An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.

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

down-to-earth

We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

This vanity provides wise governments with a highly useful tool. Rather than taxing the rich, these governments should learn to give the rich plenty of honour and status – in return for doing all the good things that these narcissists wouldn’t normally bother with, like funding schools and hospitals and paying their workers well.

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.

provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal

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 …