I’ve just started reading Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, and I liked these words of wisdom in the introduction:
This is perhaps the most important lesson we can learn from a history of ideas: that intellectual life – arguably the most important, satisfying and characteristic dimension to our existence – is a fragile thing, easily destroyed or wasted.
Plato’s effects on Calvin, Nietzsche’s admiration for Socrates, Buddhism and nineteenth-century German thought, a pre-Freudian psychologist of the unconscious, (Israel Salanter, 1810-1883), the link between Newton and Adam Smith, between Emerson and Hinduism, Bayle’s anticipation of Karl Popper, the parallels between late antiquity and Renaissance Florence.