William Irvine

Instead of spending your life pursuing something genuinely valuable, you squandered it because you allowed yourself to be distracted by the various baubles life has to offer.

how the mind may always pursue a steady and favourable course, may be well-disposed towards itself, and may view its conditions with joy

attended by constant cheerfulness and a joy that is deep and issues from deep within, since he finds delight in his own resources, and desires no joys greater than his inner joys

we are unlikely to have a good and meaningful life unless we can overcome our insatiability.

Cicero put it, Socrates was “the first to call philosophy down from the heavens and set her in the cities of men and bring her also into their homes and compel her to ask questions about life and morality and things good and evil.”2 The classicist Francis MacDonald Cornford describes Socrates’ philosophical significance in similar terms: “Pre-Socratic philosophy begins … with the discovery of Nature; Socratic philosophy begins with the discovery of man’s soul.