By contrast, notes philosopher-author Alain de Botton, a writer can make us feel he knows us personally by writing about his own foibles and complexities. A psychic might do something similar. You can give a very convincing psychic reading by describing the conflicts and insecurities you feel yourself and substituting ‘You’ for ‘I’. If an author

The first point to consider when looking at how to apply Stoic thought to our real lives is that Stoicism, along with Epicureanism and the other major Hellenistic schools, were entirely concerned with the art of living. Even Aristotle, who arrived at the conclusion that a life of intellectual contemplation was the best way to live, was still

Plato, as we’ve just seen, had set out his ethical system whereby such ethical notions as goodness, virtue and justice were identified as far-off, objective concepts, known to us only by their pale imitations that we are able to perceive here on Earth. No amount of human introspection could bring us closer to these eternal truths; instead, it was

In his sentimental longing for happiness, his self-conscious treading of a different path, and a desire to return to nature, Rousseau led the Romantic movement in France, which was one part of a larger wave spreading across Europe. Around this time in Germany, Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, in which a lovesick man

The present is a fact; the future is contingent. While an antidote to a fear of death is to embrace the present, we cannot remain there for long. At some point we want to know what use the current objects of our attention are to us, or how they might affect us for better or for worse, or how they compare to what we have seen before; and with these

We might, worse, choose how to live based almost entirely on a reaction against the way we have been treated by people and thus hand over control of our life force to the transgressors of our past.

The valued opinions of a few friends who know us well could be of enormous benefit. Given the importance we tend to ascribe to how we come across to other people, it is astonishing that we are so hostile to honest feedback. Criticisms make us defensive or upset, and flattery sinks in too deeply. If we wish to make progress with a character trait,

So there we have it: an unexpected corollary of Epictetus’s advice. If we ignore everything over the other side of that line – everything that we do not control, everything other than our own thoughts and actions – we tend to remove anxiety and even achieve more success. And by reminding ourselves, as and when pressures arise, to distinguish

For if, as the Greeks believed, our emotions are tied up with our thoughts and beliefs, if they are in essence ‘cognitive’ and will change and shift as those beliefs are modified, then we can see them as fundamentally rational. We can in fact delve deeper and decide if certain emotions are reasonable or unreasonable, true or false and so on,