ITT: Book that change your life

How do people change their convictions then?
I went from Rino repub to liberal to alt right and now I’m pure ascetic.

What? I didn't say people can't change their convictions.

There is no such thing as a change of mind, only a change in priorities.

What a waste of trips

What, slightly neurotic?

Vico's New Science
Barfield's Poetic Diction
ANW's Process and Reality
Benjamin's Illuminations
Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire (went on to read all his stuff as a result of having read this book)
Pater's Appreciations
Browne's Garden of Cyrus (etc.)
Emerson's Essays (when a kid)
Montaigne's Essays (subsequently)
Thucydides' History (of the Greeks most of all)
Quintillian's Rhetoric (of the Romans most of all)
Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being
*with the exceptions of Browne, Emerson and Montaigne what all these authors have in common is that they initiated courses of reading that lasted some months after
t. obviously gettingolderfag

The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer.

House of 7 Gables and Billy Budd were so boring I dropped out of my English Lit program. I guess that counts as life changing

no dude, not all people are brainlets who stay in one worldview. I'm a former classical Marxist who had an authoritarian bent who's become a basic ass liberal bitch because while I despise liberal passivity I see nothing but the death drive in the high modernist project, in its fascist or communist forms. Reading played a large role in that transformation, in works ranging from liberal apologetics, post-left Marxism, to Evola tier reaction. I don't agree with everything I read but I try to take it as a moment to challenge my assumptions. I remember when I was an edgy teen I hated the Bible and Christianity by making them a metaphorical spook of what I deemed to be the oppressive moral nature of society, I'm really glad I don't think that way anymore. Pic related changed my life in a way not related to politics but in my understanding of myself. Was quite painful desu.

Notes from the Underground for me as well. Now I really dig Kierkegaard and finally just got around to starting Crime and Punishment.

I don't think I ever thought about anything in quite the same way in the aftermath of reading the Republic as an undergrad. It is probably the single most influential book I've ever read.

can you elaborate user? I like and appreciate the allegory of the cave but the rest of the Republic doesn't appeal to me at all, maybe I'm just a brainlet but what about it is so profound? Could be the fault of the translation but Plato seems to rambling a lot about half-baked civic virtues in a very un-stylistically non-pleasing way.

You forgot to add nigger in there at the end

Unironically my Bible

what do you like about kierkegaard? I read Fear and Trembling and the first bit was pretty interesting but then it just became fog and contemplative masturbation that I couldnt get anything from

Notes from Underground was great though

It's the allegory of the cave, the allegory of the sun, and the ideas about the Form of the Good. I read it as a freshman, 18 years old and coming from a public school background with a fairly half-baked Catholic upbringing. I'd never been introduced to anything like metaphysics or epistemology. Then, all of a sudden, Socrates starts to talk about the world beyond the world--the world above the world, the "real" world, of which the sensible world is only a shadow or an echo. It blew my mind. It was like I'd been a horse wearing blinders my whole life, and then the blinders were taken off, and the full field of my vision was open at last. I've never been the same.

1. your diary, desu
2. your mom begged me to read it after I fucked her
3. the belief that you weren't a virgin

Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky seem to both have a bit of overlap in how they tackled the pervasion of european philosophy throughout the world, both of their earlier writing pertaining directly to Hegel. Fear and Trembling is tough, but maybe I would recommend Training in Christianity, a much later work with his name actually signed to it. It's actually pretty spooky the dudes never read each other and came from 2 places significantly different culturally while tackling the same ideas around the same time.

I totally agree about the Cave. Guess I'll have to reread for the other stuff you mentioned, it's been a long time since I've read it tbqh. The way you talk about that feeling of having the blinders taken off seems to be a blissful counterpart to the sheer dread I used to get as a kid when I thought about the universe and if there could be anything outside of it, or what would be if it didn't exist. Still kind of freaks me out desu but not in the way when I was an anxious, overthinking kid without any real attachment to the world, so it felt like it could disappear at any moment. It was like a small glimpse out of the cave, for half a second. But the light is way too blinding.

Nice. I read life together and really enjoyed it but I’m kind of a brainlet so even though it’s only like one hundred pages I had to reread so many times to get stuff.

Left the priesthood after reading the complete series. (Patriarchs and Prophets, Prophets and Kings, Desire of Ages, Acts of the Apostles, The Great Controversy)

egwwritings-a.akamaihd.net/pdf/en_PP.pdf

You did not have that conviction

Unironically this.
Vive la guerre éternelle!

By priesthood you mean Catholic?

...

Anyone with this patience and application isn't a brainlet. An autist, maybe, but that's a good sign.

If Chesterton's Orthodoxy shattered OP's former convictions he either had spectacularly weak convictions or he needs to seek mental help.