The Consolations of Philosophy (Kindle highlights)

If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right. (p. 16)
The topics may have dated, but the underlying moral has not: other people may be wrong, even when they are in important positions, even when they are espousing beliefs held for centuries by vast majorities. And the reason is simple: they have not examined their beliefs logically. (p. 20)
Pottery looks as difficult as it is. Unfortunately, arriving at good ethical ideas doesn’t, belonging instead to a troublesome class of superficially simple but inherently complex activities. (p. 23)
A correct statement is one incapable of being rationally contradicted. (p. 24)
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. (p. 29)
Social life is beset with disparities between others’ perceptions of us and our reality. We are accused of stupidity when we are being cautious. Our shyness is taken for arrogance and our desire to please for sycophancy. (p. 40)
The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion. To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen always to the dictates of reason. (p. 42)
Epicurus drank water rather than wine, and was happy with a dinner of bread, vegetables and a palmful of olives. (p. 56)
Fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive. (p. 56)
Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. (p. 57)
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. (p. 57)
Simplicity did not affect the friends’ sense of status because, by distancing themselves from the values of Athens, they had ceased to judge themselves on a material basis. There was no need to be embarrassed by bare walls, and no benefit in showing off gold. Among a group of friends living outside the political and economic centre of the city, there was – in the financial sense – nothing to prove. (p. 58)
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. (p. 59)
Epicurus’s tripartite division suggested that happiness was dependent on some complex psychological goods but relatively independent of material ones, beyond the means required to purchase some warm clothes, somewhere to live and something to eat. (p. 60)
To plot the Epicurean relation between money and happiness on a graph, money’s capacity to deliver happiness is already present in small salaries and will not rise with the largest. We will not cease being happy with greater outlay, but we will not, Epicurus insisted, surpass levels of happiness already available to those on a limited income. (p. 60)
Happiness depends more on the possession of a congenial companion than a well-decorated villa. (p. 64)
The possession of the greatest riches does not resolve the agitation of the soul nor give birth to remarkable joy. (p. 64)
Expensive objects can feel like plausible solutions to needs we don’t understand. Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. (p. 65)
Unfortunately, there is no shortage of desirable images of luxurious products and costly surroundings, fewer of ordinary settings and individuals. We receive little encouragement to attend to modest gratifications – playing with a child, conversations with a friend, an afternoon in the sun, a clean house, cheese spread across fresh bread. (p. 68)
For Epicurus, most businesses stimulate unnecessary desires in people who fail to understand their true needs, (p. 70)
Happiness may be difficult to attain. The obstacles are not primarily financial. (p. 72)
Yet David’s rendering of the moment fitted, however clumsily, into a lengthy history of admiration for the manner in which the Roman endured his appalling fate. (p. 77)
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. (p. 80)
In the Senecan view what makes us angry are dangerously optimistic notions about what the world and other people are like. (p. 83)
How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we think of as normal. (p. 83)
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. (p. 84)
We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectibility of existence. (p. 85)
In the early morning, we should undertake what Seneca termed a praemeditatio, a meditation in advance, on all the sorrows of mind and body to which the goddess may subsequently subject us. (p. 91)
Seneca more wisely asks us to consider that bad things probably will occur, but adds that they are unlikely ever to be as bad as we fear. (p. 96)
Stoicism does not recommend poverty; it recommends that we neither fear nor despise it. (p. 98)
We should not import into scenarios where they don’t belong pessimistic interpretations of others’ motives. (p. 105)
Of course, there would be few great human achievements if we accepted all frustrations. (p. 106)
Unfortunately, the mental faculties which search so assiduously for alternatives are hard to arrest. They continue to play out scenarios of change and progress even when there is no hope of altering reality. (p. 107)
To generate the energy required to spur us to action, we are reminded by jolts of discomfort – anxiety, pain, outrage, offence – that reality is not as we would wish it. Yet these jolts have served no purpose if we cannot subsequently effect improvement, (p. 107)
It is no less unreasonable to accept something as necessary when it isn’t as to rebel against something when it is. (p. 109)
We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom. (p. 109)
We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. (p. 147)
One man’s honest, unguarded portrait of himself – in which he mentions impotence and farting, in which he writes of his dead friend and explains that he needs quiet when sitting on the toilet – enables us to feel less singular about sides of ourselves that have gone unmentioned in normal company and normal portraits, but which, it seems, are no less a part of our reality. (p. 149)
Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not. (p. 157)
Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter. (p. 158)
But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old. (p. 166)
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough. (p. 168)
The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles and ants – and are rarely any happier. (p. 197)
We do have one advantage over moles. We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems – and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life. (p. 199)
Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it. (p. 199)
There are fewer stories than there are people on earth, the plots repeated ceaselessly while the names and backdrops alter. (p. 200)
We must, between periods of digging in the dark, endeavour always to transform our tears into knowledge. (p. 202)
Fulfilment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good. (p. 210)
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. (p. 228)
Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad. (p. 244)