The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Anything below a Level 10 effort into your Level 10 problems means you are not as disciplined as you need to be. It doesn’t matter how many cold plunges you do at 5:00 a.m. while reading your book of the week. If you aren’t putting a Level 10 effort into your Level 10 problems, it means you are procrastinating and avoiding what really matters. That is undisciplined.”

“Education is the reason why we behave like human beings.”

“For why should we stand reverent before waterfalls and mountaintops, or a summer moon on a quiet sea, and not before the highest miracle of all: a man who is both great and good?”

“The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order.

Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls.

Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge.

Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and in seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete.

When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect. When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated.

When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated. When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order. When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy.”

“Why do we love Plato? Because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the intoxication of dialectical revelry, passionate seeker of the elusive reality behind thoughts and things.

We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wild nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity.

We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be forgiven for whatever errors he has made.”

“It is easier to be original in error than in truth, for every truth displaces a thousand falsehoods.”

“It must be so; no list could exhaust the treasure of man’s heritage or equal its infinite variety. And it is well; let us have many lists and many heroes.”

“Euripides the human, denouncer of slavery, critic and understanding defender of women, doubter of all certainties and lover of all men: no wonder the youth of Greece declaimed his lines in the streets, and captive Athenians won their freedom by reciting his plays from memory. ‘If I were certain that the dead have consciousness,’ said the dramatist Philemon, ‘I would hang myself to see Euripides.’”

“What matters is that on every page there is a godlike energy of soul, and for that we will forgive a man anything. Life is beyond criticism, and Shakespeare is more alive than life.”

“Even in our time, then, there can be giants.”

“I bequeath myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;

If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fiber your blood. 

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search another;

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.”

“Perhaps you are a college graduate, and are ready, then, to begin your education.”

“These are sad books, but by the time we reach the end of our list we shall be strong enough to face truth without anesthesia.”

“This, then, is our Odyssey of books. Here is another world, containing the selected excellence of a hundred generations; not quite so fair and vital as this actual world of nature and human enterprise, but abounding nevertheless in unsuspected wisdom and beauty unexplored.

Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with a profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books.

When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats.

For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back, and always await our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.”

“If we find that civilizations come and go, and mortality is upon all the works of man, we shall confess the irrefutability of death, and be consoled if, during the day of our lives and our nations, we move slowly upward, and become a little better than we were.

If we find that philosophers are of slighter stature now than in the days of broad-backed Plato and the substantial Socrates, that our sculptors are lesser men than Donatello or Angelo, our painters inferior to Velazquez, our composers unnamable with Shelley and Bach, we shall not despair; these stars did not all shine on the same night.

Our problem is whether the total and average level of human ability has increased, and stands at its peak today.

When we take a total view, and compare our modern existence, precarious and chaotic as it is, with the ignorance, superstition, brutality, cannibalism, and diseases of primitive peoples, we are a little comforted: the lowest strata of our race may still differ only slightly from such men, but above those strata thousands and millions have reached to mental and moral heights inconceivable, presumably, to the early mind.”

“As to happiness, no man can say; it is an elusive angel, destroyed by detection and seldom amenable to measurement.”

“We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers.”

“I let the reader, then, make his own lists, helping himself to what he likes in mine. Let him try to build for himself another perspective and unity that shall clarify human development for him. And let him remember the words which Napoleon bequeathed to the duke of Reichstadt at St. Helena: ‘May my son study history, for it is the only true psychology, and the only true philosophy.’”