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

down-to-earth

Plato proposed that our lives go wrong in large part because we almost never give ourselves time to think carefully and logically enough about our plans.

all of us are generalists inside. We were not born to do one thing only. It’s merely the economy that – for its own greedy ends – pushes us to sacrifice ourselves to one discipline alone, rendering us (in Marx’s words) ‘one-sided and dependent’ and ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine.’ It was in the Manuscripts of 18

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.

We look at the world through the prism of our own narrow interests. Our professional needs colour what we pay attention to and bother with. We treat others and nature as means and not as ends.

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

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.

Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such s

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