In my opinion, we live in one of most un-philosophical periods in the history of human beings. Almost no one cares about learning how to think - apparently because no one sees any value in it. Instead, we spend our life frightened, angry, greedy and depressed. History shows that periods like that don’t last forever. Someday we will look back and be ashamed.
“there’s one proposition that I’d defend to the death, if I could, by argument and by action: that as long as we think we should search for what we don’t know we’ll be better people – less fainthearted and less lazy – than if we were to think that we had no chance of discovering what we don’t know and that there’s no point in even searching for it."
- Socrates talking in Plato's Meno, 86b-c.
"Those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don’t know."
- Socrates talking in Plato's Lysis (218a2-b1)
"I think many people could have achieved wisdom if they did not believe they had done so already."
"No one cares about philosophy. Far from any discoveries being made on topics left inadequately researched by the ancients, many earlier discoveries are falling into oblivion. Yet, by Hercules, if we set about the subject with all our might, if young people sobered up and put their backs into it, if older people taught it, younger people learned it, we would hardly get to the bottom where the truth is located; at the moment we are scraping at the surface with feeble hands in our search for it".
"Excellence of mind cannot be borrowed or bought. I think too that if it were for sale, it would not find a buyer. Yet wickedness is purchased every day."
"No one cares about philosophy. Far from any discoveries being made on topics left inadequately researched by the ancients, many earlier discoveries are falling into oblivion. Yet, by Hercules, if we set about the subject with all our might, if young people sobered up and put their backs into it, if older people taught it, younger people learned it, we would hardly get to the bottom where the truth is located; at the moment we are scraping at the surface with feeble hands in our search for it".
- Seneca, On Natural Questions 7.32.1
"Excellence of mind cannot be borrowed or bought. I think too that if it were for sale, it would not find a buyer. Yet wickedness is purchased every day."
- Seneca, Letters 27.8
https://janniklindquist.substack.com/p/wickedness-is-purchased-every-day/comments