Deep Thinking: 5 Books That Will Help You Understand The World Differently

To live is to learn, and to read is to learn from the experience of others. Reading is my favourite way to learn new worldviews, principles, ideas, mindsets, perceptions and mental models.

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book goes beyond the change of perception; it can easily become part of our daily consciousness, guiding our every choice and judgement.

“Books are an extraordinary device, transitioning through time and space, moving from person to person and leaving behind insight and connection,” says Seth Godin. Thought-provoking books are the treasured wealth of the world.

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli

“Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don’t take your intuitions and ideas to be ‘natural’: they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us.”

“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.”

For Small Creatures Such As We: Rituals and reflections for finding wonder by Sasha Sagan

“No matter what the universe has in store, it cannot take away from the fact that you were born. You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here. And even when any record of our individual lives is lost to the ages, that won’t detract from the fact that we were. We lived. We were part of the enormity. All the great and terrible parts of being alive, the shocking sublime beauty and heartbreak, the monotony, the interior thoughts, the shared pain and pleasure. It really happened. All of it. On this little world that orbits a yellow star out in the great vastness. And that alone is cause for celebration.”

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

“Theirs was a failure of imagination, though, two overlapping but private delusions. G. H. would have pointed out that the information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans. No one could plead ignorance that was not willful. You didn’t have to scrutinize the curve to know; you didn’t even have to read the papers, because our phones reminded us many times daily precisely how bad things had got. How easy to pretend otherwise.”

Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared Diamond

“History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves”

“All human societies contain inventive people. It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.”

“My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.”

Great Thinkers by The School of Life Press

“…simplicity is really an achievement — it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.”

“Aristotle also observed that every virtue seems to be bang in the middle of two vices. It occupies what he termed ‘the golden mean’ between two extremes of character.”

“The primary thing we need to learn is not just maths or spelling, but how to be good: we need to learn about courage, self-control, reasonableness, independence and calm.”