Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is one of the greatest guides to well-being ever written.

For Aristotle, well-being involves becoming a good person through practice and having a life of the mind. To this end, he vividly sketches portraits of virtuous and vicious characters and offers practical advice on everything from eating and drinking to managing money, controlling anger, getting along with others, and making jokes. He also distinguishes different kinds of wisdom that are necessary for well-being and offers an unusual perspective on how to appreciate our place in the universe and our relationship with the divine.

The book How to Flourish, with anthology and commentary by Susan Sauvé Meyer, distills this fundamental work of Aristotle, making his timeless ideas about how to live a good life more appealing and accessible than ever.

Clearly, being alive is something we have in common with plants, but we are looking for something characteristically human, so let us set aside the life of nutrition and growth. The next would be the life of perception, but this too is shared with the horse and the ox and every animal. What remains is a life that uses our thinking part—a part that responds to thought, while another part has thought and engages in contemplation…