Description: Here is the only book of wisdom that you'll ever need; a unique tome that offers diagnoses for the afflictions of unpopularity, not having enough money, frustration, inadequacy, a broken heart, and envy through the ideas of the great philosophers.

1. Consolation for Unpopularity: We may not dare articulate our disagreements, take a position against a belief or practice which has achieved wide currency, even challenge common sense, because we fear not being liked, becoming unpopular -- an outcast. There is no better guide to overcoming the timidity of disagreement than Socrates.

2. Consolation for Not Having Enough Money: For determining the indistinct impulses of distress and desire within us, to save us from mistaken schemes of happiness, to distinguish our true needs from our superficial wants, there is no better guide than Epicurus.

3. Consolation for Frustration: Frustration is no more than the collision of a wish with reality; its usual result is pain. Our earliest frustrations begin as infants when we learn that our mothers will not always attend to our wishes, and that the source of our greatest pleasure does not lie within our control. Frustration can be the well spring of anger, despair, anxiety, depression -- a panoply of pernicious accompanying emotions unless we prepare ourselves. What better guide than Seneca.

4. Consolation for Inadequacy: The ancient philosophers trusted our powers of reasoning would afford us a happiness offering mastery over the world and ourselves. And yet, who of us are serenely rational -- and not hysterical, demented, agitated, inconstant? As a perplexing, humiliating mix of reasonable and animal instincts, to whom can we turn for wisdom inaccommodating our noisy, baser, more offensive selves than Montaigne.

5. Consolation for a Broken Heart: We all know the pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are radically different projects which love maliciously confuses. What force is powerful enough to distort the reason's judgment, exclude intellect from its resolutions and secret decisions, but the will to life -- we are dogs tied to the chariot of the will to life, proclaimed Schopenhauer -- the darkest of thinkers, and yet paradoxically the most cheering.

6. Consolation for Envy: "The worst sicknesses men have originated in the way they have combated their sicknesses. The so-called consolations, these instantaneous alleviations often had to be paid with a profound worsening of the complaint. Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. To alleviate envy requires a pain-dependent consolation", proclaimed Nietzche.

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