The long view

One idea from each of the 7 books on this topic.

• You arrived with nothing in your hands, and you’ll leave with nothing in your hands. Whatever pile you build in between doesn’t travel with you. Some people even manage to lose it before they die, so the whole labor of a life buys them exactly nothing, twice.

  From Ecclesiastes by Qoheleth

• An empty boat drifts into yours on the river, and even a short-tempered man stays calm. If someone is sitting in it, he shouts, and by the third shout he is cursing. “If he could only roam empty through life, who would be able to injure him?”

  From Zhuangzi by Zhuangzi

• Every so often, spend 3 or 4 days on the cheapest food and roughest clothes, and ask yourself whether this is what you were afraid of. Soldiers drill in peacetime. Practise hardship while life is kind, and it loses much of its power to scare you.

  From Letters from a Stoic by Seneca

• A small flame goes out when you throw something on it. A strong fire takes what you throw on it, burns it, and gets higher. Whatever is blocking you is not separate from the work. It is the material the work now has to use.

  From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

• Plato defined a human being as a two-footed animal without feathers. Diogenes plucked a chicken, carried it into the school, and said, “This is Plato’s man.”

  From Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius

• When you buy a horse, you strip off the saddle and look at the legs. Judge a person the same way, without money, titles or fine clothes. “Measure him without his stilts,” then ask what kind of mind is left.

  From Essays by Michel de Montaigne

• A demon says you must live this same life again. Every small pain and every small joy, in the same order, forever. If that thought got power over you, it would crush you or remake you.

  From The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche