Diogenes: "I feel the same way, bro. I would want to be me too."

That's not true. For a long time he owned a clay cup even though he didn't need it

Mhmm. Gross.

Nietzsche is such a wonderful read, because he has the soul of a poet and doesn't give a damn if he's being consistent.

Kierkegaard is harder to parse, but very fascinating.

Marcus Aurelius legit just wants you to be a good human being.

Yamamato Tsunetomo wants you to kill people and don't afraid of anything.

Musonius Rufus is remarkably modern in his thinking for someone of the first century AD.

Well I think Karl Marx agrees on some way. But when you are BFFs with Engels and enjoy Fox Hunts as a pass time, are you eating the rich or just saying everyone should eat like the rich?

One that I really enjoyed during my pretentious phase was the father of modern philosophy himself, Immanuel Kant. He wrote a lot about ethics and aesthetics but the crux of his work boils down to the idea that space and time are just "forms of intuition" that structure our experience and are just appearances we can comprehend. The true nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us.

As someone who has always considered themselves very rational and more of an agnostic than an atheist, his ideas really clicked with me.

Camus! Just enjoy everything! Rebel against meaning!

There are characters like this in New Orleans. They just get by and get high with the community. Homeless people really help each other out down there too

Also slavery was typically ~~nowhere near as~~ a different sort of brutal in that era. Still brutal and terrible, but not "working people to death and then shipping in more people to work to death" brutal.

Edit: changed my wording because slavery has always been fucking horrible, e.g. eunuchs