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

I am going to draw on some of my favourite thinking from the last two millennia, most of which will come from a time when philosophers – literally ‘lovers of wisdom’ – were concerned with how we might best live.

Far from undermining the point of kindness, this serves as a reminder that it’s good for us. Being kind creates more pleasure for us than pain; Epicurus would take this as evidence that it is the wisest way to live, while the Stoics would embrace it for the fact that it is a rational consequence of living in undisturbed accordance with all things.

Marcus Aurelius offers us another thought that might help us to clarify our aims: Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.2

If we were the last person on Earth, we wouldn’t bother with buffetless ventilators or ironic iPhone cases. When the desire to impress others is removed, we live a more authentically Epicurean existence. And again, we should not make the mistake of thinking that Epicurus would deny us such things as a fancy fan. Instead, he would have us not cultiv