Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren’t 2,000 years old, aren’t interested in the topics of Plato’s dialogues and have a so-called ordinary life. ‘You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff.’

Seneca, Spinoza’s favourite philosopher, had compared human beings to dogs on a leash being led by the necessities of life in a range of directions. The more one pulls against what is necessary, the more one is strangled; and therefore the wise must always endeavour to understand ahead of time how things are – for example, what love is like, or how politics works – and then change their direction accordingly so as not to be strangled unnecessarily. It is this kind of Stoic attitude that constantly pervades Spinoza’s philosophy

The best way to know God is to understand how life and the universe work: it is through a knowledge of psychology, philosophy and the natural sciences that one comes to understand God

World history’ he says, ‘is the record of the mind’s efforts to understand itself.’ At different points in history, different aspects of the mind are more prominent.

Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives.

Academia was deeply prestigious in Montaigne’s day, as in our own. Montaigne was an excellent scholar but he hated pedantry. He only wanted to learn things that were useful and relentlessly attacked academia for being out of touch: ‘If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life,’ he said. Only that which makes us feel better may be worth understanding