The only thing that is usually certain about the many quotations attributed to Socrates is that he probably never said them. Both of the main sources of Socrates’ sayings in Plato and Zenophon are unreliable. It is clear that neither were as interested in Socrates per se, as in using him to promote their own … More What Socrates ought to have said: ‘The unchallenged life is not worth living’.

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”. (Charles Dickens: the first sentence of David Copperfield (1849-50)). Visualizing the future self and the use of memories of past visualisations when that future presents itself. I have always … More “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”. 

The phrase ‘ a healthy mind in a healthy body’ from Juvenal Satires X haunts the insistence on doing physical exercise or elae of advisers, counsellors and other ‘Job’s comforters ‘ (Job 2: 11). Read on from Job verse 2  if you want the content of their advice and Job’s summary of it in his … More ‘et potiores / Herculis aerumnas credat saevosque labores / et venere et cenis et pluma Sardanapalli’. Minding Physical exercise.

A quotation from Balzac is worthless as a  proposition of a supposed truth as held and stated by that great soul, for these quotations are often, as this is, the stated view of a character in a novel, a thing up for debate. It is a good proposition to start with in  response to this … More The silliest binary of them all is that between positive and negative life events.