Great Thinkers Quotes

“But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Anger is, in the Stoic analysis, caused by the violent collision of hope and reality. We”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“The ideal parent is not anxiously hanging around trying to micromanage everything. The ideal parent makes it feel that problems, difficulties and dangers don’t always have to be avoided: they can be coped with, solved or skilfully overcome. Such a parent makes the child secure.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Children don’t suffer from habit, which is why they get excited by some very key but simple things like puddles, jumping on the bed, sand and fresh bread. But we adults get ineluctably spoilt; which is why we seek ever more powerful stimulants (like fame and love). The trick – in Proust’s eyes – is to recover the powers of appreciation of a child in adulthood, to strip the veil of habit and therefore to start to look upon daily life with a new and more grateful sensitivity. This for Proust is what one group in the population does all the time: artists.”
― School of Life, Great Thinkers

“One of Marx’s greatest insights, delivered in an early book known as the Manuscripts of 1844, is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest joys. It is because Marx had such high hopes for work that he was so angry at the miserable work that most of humanity is forced to endure. In order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves in the objects they have created’. At its best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what’s good inside us (let’s say, our creativity, our rigour, our logic), and to give it a stable, enduring form in some sort of object or service independent of us.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Plato propose to make people more fulfilled? Four central ideas stand out in his work. 1. Think harder 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. And so we end up with the wrong values, careers and relationships. Plato wanted to bring order and clarity to our minds.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple tools from sixty great thinkers to improve your life today

“Sartre was the beneficiary of a desire, which became widespread in the second half of the 20th century, to revere books for the mystery they appeared to touch, rather than for the clarity of their claims.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“An extraordinary number of adverts focus on the three very things that Epicurus identified as false lures of happiness: romantic love, professional status and luxury.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“The great works of culture have it in their power to clear mental confusion, they give us words for things we had felt but had not previously grasped; they replace cliché with insight.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Morris wished for people to see their purchases as investments and buy items sparingly. He would have preferred for someone to spend £1,000 on an intricate, hand-made dining set that would last for decades and grow to become a family heirloom, than for each generation to buy its own cheap alternative, just to be thrown away when fashions changed.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“Aristotle also observed that every virtue seems to be bang in the middle of two vices. It occupies what he termed ‘the golden mean’ between two extremes of character.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“He simply believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency Warenfetischismus (commodity fetishism) because it makes us value things that have no objective value and encourages us to see our relationships with others primarily in economic terms. This”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“We are used to thinking of flattery as bad – but in fact it is rather helpful, for flattery encourages us to live up to the appealing image it presents. The”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today