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

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

1 " Set clear goals and channel all your energies into reaching them, the self-help books advise. This approach assumes we’ve identified our destination before beginning our journey. Life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you don’t know where you’re going until you start moving. So move. Start where you are. Make a single brushstroke and see where it leads. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

2 " Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

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

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

4 " For Socrates, philosophy and conversation were virtually synonymous. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

5 " Happiness is a by-product, never an objective. It’s an unexpected windfall from a life lived well. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

6 " Take heart, says Epicurus. Nature has you covered. She has made the necessary desires easy to obtain and the unnecessary ones difficult "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

7 " Bertrand Russell, who lived until the age of ninety-seven, suggests expanding the circle of your interests, making them “wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

8 " Fighting, done properly, is productive. Both sides can arrive not only at a win-win solution but something more: a solution that neither would have found had they not fought in the first place. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

9 " The Porcupine’s Dilemma, as it’s now known, is our dilemma, too. We need others to survive, but others can hurt us. Relationships demand constant course corrections, and even the most skilled navigators get pricked now and then. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

10 " 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. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

11 " 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. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

12 " Arriving at answers of the heart demands not only patience but a willingness to sit with your ignorance. Staying with the doubt, the mystery, rather than rushing to solve the problem, to check off another item on your endless to-do list. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

13 " We’ve amassed enough accolades, saved enough money, to know how meaningless they are. Sisyphus at twenty-five still holds out hope that maybe, maybe this time the rock won’t roll down the hill. Sisyphus at seventy-five has no such illusions. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

14 " Anything that increases desire increases suffering. Anything that reduces desire—reduces willing, as Schopenhauer puts it—alleviates suffering. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

15 " Music speaks of the essence, the thing-in-itself, and so “expresses the innermost nature of all life "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

16 " Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

17 " Weil paid great attention to matters most of us consider trivial. Handwriting, for instance. In high school, relays her friend and biographer Simone Pétrement, Weil decided to reform her “sloppy, almost careless, scrawled handwriting.” She worked at it tirelessly, attentively, despite headaches and frequently swollen and painful hands. Her scrawl grew “progressively less rigid and more supple and, finally, attained the pure, beautiful script of her last years. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

18 " Rousseau: his final and unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

19 " We are like travelers at an inn, just passing through, observing the “No Smoking” sign, leaving the room the way we found it, and perhaps dropping "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers

20 " Good walkers, all of them. None, though, compares with Rousseau. He’d regularly walk twenty miles in a single day. "

― Eric Weiner , The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers