The pursuit of the good life, for the Greeks, was a profoundly personal, emotion-laden, all-consuming quest for a beautiful soul. The beautiful soul was worth sacrificing everything for. Everything! Socrates stands before his neighbors and says the unthinkable—that there is something worse than death: living an ugly, wicked, boring life. This is not the stuff of Kant’s “pure reason.” It’s the stuff of personal vision, insight, and a foolhardy courage to speak the truth. It’s the zest that makes life significant. This is what Emerson found so attractive about Socrates. Socrates believed that the pursuit of the Good was a kind of divine madness. I paged through the Phaedrus and found one of my favorite bits: “The best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god...There is no truth to that story that when a lover is available you should give your favors to a man who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of himself.."

American Philosophy: A Love Story 

everything is gonna be alright - d murphy