John Gray’s latest book Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life is just out. Bellow is Gray’s summary of ten cat lessons on how to live well. 1. Never try to persuade human beings…

Life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error.

They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness.

In the opening pages of his book If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Italo Calvino drops a really interesting (and possible) categorization of books. I am still digesting how I would fit certain books…

What I do is in no sense done for your enjoyment or benefit, as you seem to think. Finally, if I by chance exterminated your species, I should not know it.

Strolling is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.

And that is, I believe, a part of defiance against death. I don’t want to know which from those books will remain unread. That will remain uncertain until the very last moment.

I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.

Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated his book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873) to an extremely important part in the history of philosophy: philosophy before Socrates. In a chapter dedicated to Thales, he offers a…