The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

by Eric Weiner

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” Knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.

Knowledge is something you possess. Wisdom is something you do. It is a skill and, like all skills, one you can learn. But it requires effort. Expecting to acquire wisdom by luck is like expecting to learn to play the violin by luck.

You can love something you don’t possess, and never will. It is the pursuit that matters.

There’s something about a train that stays with us.

Technology seduces us into believing philosophy no longer matters. Who needs Aristotle when we have algorithms?

Philosophy is different from other subjects. It is not a body of knowledge but a way of thinking—a way of being in the world. Not a “what” or a “why” but a “how.”

It was not the meaning of life that interested them but leading meaningful lives.

We always need wisdom, but we need different kinds of wisdom at different stages of our lives. The “how to” questions that matter to a fifteen-year-old are not the ones that matter to a thirty-five-year-old—or a seventy-five-year-old. Philosophy has something vital to say about each stage.

Mornings provoke powerful, conflicting emotions.

It’s living proof that absolute power does not always corrupt absolutely.

Obstacles are relative, though. One person’s messy desk is another’s ruffian invasion.

Other people can’t hurt you, for “nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can hurt you.” Of course. Why do I care what others think when thinking, by definition, occurs entirely inside their minds, not mine?

Duty comes from inside, obligation from outside. When we act out of a sense of duty, we do so voluntarily to lift ourselves, and others, higher. When we act out of obligation, we do so to shield ourselves, and only ourselves, from repercussions.

Feelings, like thoughts, never come out of the blue. There’s always a locomotive pulling them along.

Scholars deploy many fancy terms to describe Socrates’s method: the dialectic, the elenchus, inductive reasoning. I prefer a simpler term: talking.

We must step back from ourselves to see ourselves more clearly. The best way to achieve this perspective is through conversation. For Socrates, philosophy and conversation were virtually synonymous.

The bigger the question, the less interested we are in a reply that provides merely information.

Asking a friend the right question at the right time is an act of compassion, of love. Too often, though, we deploy questions as weapons, firing them at others—

Voltaire said, the best judge of a person is not the answers they give but the questions they ask.

We rarely question the obvious. Socrates thought this oversight was a mistake. The more obvious something seems, the more urgent the need to question it.

The child’s questions irk us not because they are silly but because we are incapable of answering them adequately.

Ridicule is the price of wisdom.

A good question reframes the problem so that you see it in an entirely new light.

What does success look like?

The more we try to seize happiness the more it slips from our grasp. Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well.

Much of what we take to be human nature is social habit, Rousseau believes.

Walking supplies just the right balance of stimulation and repose, exertion and idleness.

When we walk, we are simultaneously doing and not-doing. On one level, our minds are engaged: focusing on the terrain ahead, cognizant of the periphery. Yet none of this thinking occupies much cerebral space. There’s plenty left over for meandering, and freak following.

Respond to adversity, real or imagined, not with self-pity or hand-wringing, but simply by starting over. Viewed this way, life no longer feels like a narrative gone awry, or a botched ending. None of that is real. There are no endings. Only an infinite chain of beginnings.

Walking, the slowest form of travel, is the quickest route to our more authentic selves.

Good philosophy, like a good lightbulb, brightens the room.

Places are special to the extent we make them so.

If crankiness disqualified a thinker, all of philosophy would be contained in a pamphlet.

Like Socrates, Thoreau believed all philosophy begins with wonder. He expresses this idea many times, in many ways, but my favorite is this simple line from Walden: “Reality is fabulous.”

It’s not easy to see slowly like Thoreau. Vision is the speediest sense, far faster than, say, taste.

The person attuned to beauty will find it in a garbage dump while “the fault-finder will find fault even in paradise.”

That’s unfair, I know. They have as much a right to be here as I do. It’s like traffic. When we’re stuck in it, we gripe about “all this traffic,” ignoring the fact that we’re part of the traffic, part of the problem.

Thoreau’s most famous: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Seeing is deliberate. It’s always a choice, even if we don’t realize it. Proper seeing, says Thoreau, requires “a separate intention of the eye.” It’s all about the angles.

Thoreau rarely stared at anything directly. He looked with the side of his eye. There’s a physiological basis for this. In dim light, we can detect objects best by looking at them from the side.

Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. It is in his heart. We can’t improve our vision without improving ourselves. The dynamic works both ways. Not only does who we are determine what we see but what we see determines who we are.

Seeing requires not only time but distance, he tells me. “You cannot see anything until you are clear of it.”

Music is therapy. Listening to music speeds cognitive recovery after a stroke, several studies have found. Patients in minimally conscious, or even vegetative states, showed healthier brain activity when listening to a favorite song.

Politicians are the least sincere not only because of their gutless vocabulary but also their tone of voice. Cautious and falsetto. Even a child can recognize the voice of someone selling something. Especially a child.

Too often, he said, people jump to the book rather than stay with their thoughts. “You should read only when your own thoughts dry up.”

As a woman, life is difficult even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times.

Pleasure is the only thing we desire for its own sake. Everything else, even philosophy, is a means to that one end.

Pleasure is not the opposite of pain but its absence.

Desire is nature’s GPS, guiding us toward the highest pleasures and away from the empty ones.

If goodness comes your way, enjoy it. Don’t seek it. Good things come to those who don’t expect good things to come to them.