"Every now and then, if you're lucky, you'll encounter a book that changes your life. History's great novels have earned a reputation in this regard. While the stories of Homer, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Jane Austen may not be for everyone all the time, an education in the classics can change people in profound ways and give our minds a meeting place in the world of ideas."
"Some books take a more direct approach: They explicitly aim to change how readers live their lives. They may be shelved in philosophy, psychology, or self-help, but their goal is to help you find perspective, search for meaning, or guide you to find your purpose so that when the end inevitably comes, you can look back on your life with gratitude and contentment."
"What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. Finding purpose in one's life is arguably the most potent means of change. There are countless stories of people who have altered the course of their lives by working hard to accomplish or express something important to them. Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl's semi-autobiographical magnum opus, is all about what we can achieve when we have purpose."
Classic literature can profoundly reshape perspectives and provide a shared intellectual meeting place. Practical moral and psychological works explicitly aim to change how people live by offering perspective, meaning, and guidance toward purpose. Purpose functions as a primary driver of psychological resilience and life change. Striving for goals worthy of effort sustains people through hardship and motivates meaningful achievement. Observations drawn from extreme suffering indicate that individuals with something to look forward to maintain psychological strength, while lack of purpose leads to decline. Cultivating purpose enables gratitude, endurance, and a sense of fulfilled life.
Read at Big Think
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]