Throughout his long, hectic and astonishingly varied life, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) would jot down his passing thoughts on theatre programmes, visiting cards, draft manuscripts and even bills ... Goethe was probably the last true ‘Renaissance Man’. Although employed as a Privy Councillor at the Duke of Weimar’s court, where he helped oversee major mining, road-building and irrigation projects, he also painted, directed plays, carried out research in anatomy, botany and optics – and still found time to produce masterpieces in every literary genre. His fourteen hundred Maxims and Reflections reveal some of his deepest thought on art, ethics, literature and natural science, but also his immediate reactions to books, chance encounters or his administrative work. Although variable in quality, the vast majority have a freshness and immediacy which vividly conjure up Goethe the man. They make an ideal introduction to one of the greatest of European writers.

In the Art of Worldly Wisdom Baltasar Gracian gives us pertinent and pithy advice on friendship, leadership, and success. Think of it as Machiavelli with a soul. This book is for those who wish to have an ambitious plan for success without compromising their integrity or losing their way. Audacious and captivating!

This book explores van Gogh's and Gauguin's concepts of spirituality in life and art, and the ways in which their ideas and the events of their personal lives shaped their creation of repertoires of meaningful symbolic motifs.

"Highly readable and thought-provoking ... A very pleasant and creative work." ―Dr. Larry Sanger, ex-founder of Wikipedia Economy of Truth is a collection of practical maxims and reflections either designed through clever artwork or in the form of writing only. In an enjoyable and impactful manner, Vizi Andrei aims to challenge our long-held beliefs about art, education, courage, progress, happiness, intelligence, and creativity. Readers who come to this book expecting practical guidance will not be disappointed, but they will be delighted to see that such guidance is being delivered rather artistically―via short stories that read like modern poetry, beautifully accompanied by vivid illustrations. The wisdom this book permeates with comes from figures such as Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Confucius, Epicurus, Antisthenes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel de Montaigne, Emil Cioran, Leo Tolstoy, Mircea Eliade, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Blaise Pascal, Arthur Schopenhauer, Luc de Clapiers but also Carlo M. Cipolla, Umberto Eco, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Alain de Botton, Rory Sutherland, or Naval Ravikant. "An urgent book ... Vizi's work is bursting with many irreverent lessons ready to help you remove the chains of modernity. This book will sharpen your thinking and help you gain clarity on a variety of crucial topics." ―Ruben Chavez, founder of ThinkGrowProsper "A well-reasoned collection of meditations ... They will contagiously make you think!" ―Luca Dellanna, author of Operational Excellence "Written in a quaint voice, this book charms the reader―mixing just the right amount of reflective self-awareness with cutting insight. For those who consider musings of great import, a pleasant stroll through Economy of Truth would be time well-spent." ―Jack Peach, teacher and traveler

Like the ancient inquiries into the nature of things, contemporary continental realism and materialism, from Deleuze to the Speculative Realists, embraces a commitment to investigate beings, without subordinating it to analyses of language, consciousness, texts or the social. This pensée brute, traditionally known as metaphysics, dares to question the one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial and the world itself. This apparent kinship is not merely thematic, since contemporary thinkers explicitly and repeatedly return to the texts and figures of the Greco-Roman world. In this volume, leading philosophers address these varied, volatile, and novel interactions and themselves contribute to reconceiving and redeploying the problems of ancient metaphysics. Alongside this are 2 original and previously unpublished translations of essays by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Aubenque.

This book is a manifesto of reformed Stoicism. It proposes a system of life which is bullet-proof, universal, viable and effective in every cosmic setting. It holds in every possible universe, under any government and within any economic system. We can be reformed Stoics no matter what we believe in. Reformed Stoicism is about enjoying and exercising our agency. In other words, it’s about the flow of making autonomous and right decisions, and about celebrating our ability to make them. With no reliance on nature, with the recalibration of metaphysical positions, with skepticism towards grand discourses and universal answers, with an emphasis on the usefulness instead of truthfulness of narratives, with no reference to the vanity argument, with criticism of both conservative and ascetic misinterpretations of Stoicism, with an overall softer and more empathic approach, we can no longer be defined by the generic term “Stoicism”. Our time, in short, calls for a fresh interpretation of Stoicism. It is time for a new generation of Stoics. Thus: reformed Stoicism.

The final volume in this significant series, this publication mirrors the broad scientific attention given to ideas and issues associated with the life-span perspective: constancy and change in human development; opportunities for and constraints on plasticity in structure and function across life; the potential for intervention across the entire life course (and thus for the creation of an applied developmental science); individual differences (diversity) in life paths, in contexts (or the ecology) of human development, and in changing relations between people and contexts; interconnections and discontinuities across age levels and developmental periods; and the importance of integrating biological, psychological, social, cultural, and historical levels of organization in order to understand human development.