Continuing the quoting marathon that is The Consolations of Philsophy:

And yet we should be grateful for the paradox. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to. (148)

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say... (158)

But writing with simplicity takes courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. So strong is this bias, Montaigne wondered whether the majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato's dialogues, in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language... (159)

But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits. Montaigne knew one man who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly: 'Whenever I ask [this] acquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his arse without studying his lexicon to find out the meaings of scab and arse.' (162)

Indeed. That's where we'll end with this for now. Need to start putting out some thesis prep before I start forgetting what was in my mind!

That last post was mostly an incoherent babble. I think what I wrote there was mostly an attempt to establish the blog -- a "lorem ipsum dolar" so to speak. (sigh)

It doesn't take a month to read a 200 page book. It may take that long for a book on philosophy. I think it would be best for the "future me" to just list all the phrases, sentences and paragraphs from Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosopy that I either found relevant for the "future" or profound for the present. I realize that this book was an introduction to one perspective on philosophy but I think it had quite a few positive qualities in it to warrant its inclusion here.

In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play. (7)

Every society has notions of what one should believe and how one should behave in order to avoid suspicion and unpopularity... To start questioning these conventions would seem bizarre, even aggressive. If common sense is cordoned off from questions, it is because its judgments are deemed plainly too sensible to be the targets of scrutiny. (9)

...Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs and at the same time that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts and follow the flock because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown, difficult truths. (13)

...it seemed that those Socrates spoke to barely knew what they were talking about. (17)

Socrates encourages us not to be unnerved by the confidence of people who fail to respect this complexity and formulate their views without at least as much rigour as a potter.  What is declared obvious and 'natural rarely is so. Recognition of this should teach us to think that the world is more flexible than it seems, for the established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are. (23)

...But we risk not knowing how to respond to people who don't agree with us, unless we have first thought through the objections to our position logically... how to respond rationally to objections as true opinion, and contrasted it unfavourably with knowledge, which involved understanding not only why something was true, but also why its alternatives were false. (25)

If we cannot match such composure, if we are prone to burst into tears after only a few harsh words about our character or achievements, it may be because the approval of others forms an essential part of our capacity to believe that we are right. We feel justified in taking unpopularity seriously not only for pragmatic reasons, for reasons of promotion or survival, but more importantly because being jeered at can seem an equivocal sign that we have gone astray. ... Socrates would naturally have conceded that there are times when we are in the wrong and should be made to doubt our views, but he would have added a vital detail to alter our sense of truth's relation to unpopularity: errors in our thought and way of life can at no point and in no way ever be proven simply by the fact that we have run into opposition. (29)

It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of their method of thinking that should determine the weight we give to their disapproval. (30)

...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. We struggle to clear up a misunderstanding, but our throat goes dry and the words found are not the ones meant. (40-41)