More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
The Socratic method for thinking 1. Locate a statement confidently described as common sense. Acting courageously involves not retreating in battle. Being virtuous requires money. 2. Imagine for a moment that, despite the confidence of the person proposing it, the statement is false. Search for situations or contexts where the statement would not be true. Could one ever be courageous and yet retreat in battle? Could one ever stay firm in battle and yet not be courageous? Could one ever have money and not be virtuous? Could one ever have no money and be virtuous? 3. If an exception is found,
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Jordan Hay liked this
Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf.
There is nothing dreadful in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.
The following method of inquiry must be applied to every desire: What will happen to me if what I long for is accomplished? What will happen if it is not accomplished?
1. Identify a project for happiness. In order to be happy on holiday, I must live in a villa. 2. Imagine that the project may be false. Look for exceptions to the supposed link between the desired object and happiness. Could one possess the desired object but not be happy? Could one be happy but not have the desired object? Could I spend money on a villa and still not be happy? Could I be happy on holiday and not spend as much money as on a villa? 3. If an exception is found, the desired object cannot be a necessary and sufficient cause of happiness. It is possible to have a miserable time in
...more
To counteract the power of luxurious images Epicureans appreciated the importance of advertising. In the AD 120s, in the central market-place of Oinoanda, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the south-western corner of Asia Minor, an enormous stone colonnade 80 metres long and nearly 4 metres high was erected and inscribed with Epicurean slogans for the attention of shoppers:
It is to pleasure that we have recourse, using the feeling as our standard for judging every good.
Whenever anyone falls at your side or behind you, cry out: ‘Fortune, you will not deceive me, you will not fall upon me confident and heedless. I know what you are planning. It is true that you struck someone else, but you aimed at me.’
Between Montaigne’s birth in 1533 and the publication of the third book of his Essays in 1588, the native population of the New World is estimated to have dropped from 80 to 10 million inhabitants.
As much as the Mongol conquests, or the entire WWII
friendship a minor conspiracy against what other people think of as reasonable.
In the friendship which I am talking about, souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found.
He alone had the privilege of my true portrait.
Scottish poet George Buchanan.
It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made
Whenever I ask [this] acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and arse.
illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli? (Directly after copulation the devil’s laughter is heard.)
Really, there is nobody living about whom I care much. The people I like have been dead for a long, long time – for example, the Abbé Galiani, or Henri Beyle, or Montaigne. He could have added another hero, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
They were curious, artistically gifted, and sexually vigorous. Despite their dark sides, they laughed, and many of them danced, too; they were drawn to ‘gentle sunlight, bright and buoyant air, southerly vegetation, the breath of the sea [and] fleeting meals of flesh, fruit and eggs’.
Several of them had a gallows humour close to Nietzsche’s own – a joyful, wicked laughter arising from pessimistic hinterlands.
What he wanted was totality; he fought against the disjunction of reason, sensuality, feeling, will.
it was impossible to attain them without feeling very miserable some of the time:
you have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet?
Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favourable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.
The recipe for becoming a good novelist … is easy to give, but to carry it out presupposes qualities one is accustomed to overlook when one says ‘I do not have enough talent.’ One has only to make a hundred or so sketches for novels, none longer than two pages but of such distinctness that every word in them is necessary; one should write down anecdotes every day until one has learnt how to give them the most pregnant and effective form; one should be tireless in collecting and describing human types and characters; one should above all relate things to others and listen to others relate,
...more
It is hard to conceive, when standing at the edge of the cruel glacier, how this frozen bulk could have a role to play in the gestation of vegetables and lush grass only a few kilometres along the valley, to imagine that something as apparently antithetical to a green field as a glacier could be responsible for the field’s fertility.
Only thoughts which come from walking have any value
Destroying the passions and desires merely in order to avoid their stupidity and the disagreeable consequences of their stupidity seems to us nowadays to be itself simply an acute form of stupidity.
