The Consolations of Philosophy

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

Not everyone is worth listening to.

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

We should not be frightened by appearances.

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.