I wish Philosophy was taught way earlier in our lives, and that someone like Alain de Botton was in charge.
<aside> 💡 What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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<aside> 💡 Happiness, an Epicurean acquisition list: Friendship. Freedom. Thoughts. (...) Wealth is of course unlikely ever to make anyone miserable. But the crux of Epicurus's argument is that if we have money without friends, freedom and an analysed life, we will never be truly happy. And if we have them, but are missing the fortune, we will never be unhappy.
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<aside> 💡 Our frustrations are tempered by what we understand we can expect from the world, by our experience of what it is normal to hope for. We aren't overwhelmed by anger whenever we are denied an object we desire, only when we believe ourselves entitled to obtain it. (...) We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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<aside> 💡 Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.
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<aside> 💡 "Stop preventing philosophers from possessing money; no one has condemned wisdom to poverty. (...) I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half."
Stoics (...) are identified as wise by only one detail: how they would respond to sudden poverty. They would walk away from the house and the servants without rage or despair.
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<aside> 💡 "The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve, or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth."
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<aside> 💡 Another cause of a sense of inadequacy is the speed and arrogance with which people seem to divide the world into two camps. the camp of the normal and that of the abnormal. (...) Montaigne bemoaned the intellectual arrogance at play. There were savages in South America; they were not the ones eating spiders:
"Every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; we have no other criterion of truth or right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country. There we always find the perfect religion, the perfect polity, the most developed and perfect way of doing anything!"
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<aside> 💡 "If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life."
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<aside> 💡 "I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. (...) We readily inquire, 'Does he know Greek or Latin?' 'Can he write poetry and prose?' BUt what matters most is what we put that last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought to find out not who understands most but who understands best. We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong empty."
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<aside> 💡 So what would Montaigne have wished pupils to learn at school? (...) The examinations would have raised questions about the challenges of quotidian life: love, sex, illness, death, children, money and ambition.
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