According to the story, Thales didn't pursue wealth and riches, being a philosopher and all who was only interested in knowledge. People challenged him saying that he only did this because he couldn't become rich, as that was what all men really wanted. To prove them wrong and show that a philosopher could easily become rich if they wanted, he used his intelligence in business to become wealthy in the next year. He did this by buying up all the olive presses in the off season, creating a sort of monopoly situation, and charging higher prices when harvest came in (which was particularly good, something he was also possibly able to predict do to his knowledge of weather). Sort of a funny story in a lot of ways, for one, you have to already be pretty rich to be able to buy up every single olive press to create a monopoly. And two, it seems unlikely that only a great wise philosopher is smart enough to think up the idea of "if I have a monopoly on something that everyone needs I can become rich by ripping them off and charging too much", and three if he was really interesting in philosophy he probably should have just spent the year working on philosophy, rather than proving how smart he was by coming up with olive schemes. But maybe that's just me.

According to the story, Thales didn't pursue wealth and riches, being a philosopher and all who was only interested in knowledge. People challenged him saying that he only did this because he couldn't become rich, as that was what all men really wanted. To prove them wrong and show that a philosopher could easily become rich if they wanted, he used his intelligence in business to become wealthy in the next year. He did this by buying up all the olive presses in the off season, creating a sort of monopoly situation, and charging higher prices when harvest came in (which was particularly good, something he was also possibly able to predict due to his knowledge of weather). Sort of a funny story in a lot of ways, for one, you have to already be pretty rich to be able to buy up every single olive press to create a monopoly. And two, it seems unlikely that only a great wise philosopher is smart enough to think up the idea of "if I have a monopoly on something that everyone needs I can become rich by ripping them off and charging too much", and three if he was really interesting in philosophy he probably should have just spent the year working on philosophy, rather than proving how smart he was by coming up with olive schemes. But maybe that's just me.

"Also, who else is every going to figure out whether or not chairs exists? Scientists? Not a chance."

"Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: 'Die at the right time!' (after reading internet comments)"

Sartre: "shit it looks like I wrote a meandering novel about a 30 something guy filled with a kind of aimless existential angst, not again..."

Why is it philosophical? They were looking at Rene Descartes taking a bath.

Sartre gives a famous example of someone looking through a keyhole, to illustrate his concept of "The Look", in Being and Nothingness.

Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. I am alone and on the level of a non-thetic self-consciousness. This means first of all that there is no self to inhabit my consciousness, nothing therefore to which I can refer my acts in order to qualify them. They are in no way known; I am my acts and hence they carry in themselves their whole justification. I am a pure consciousness of things, and things, caught up in the circuit of my selfness, offer to me their potentialities as the proof of my non-thetic consciousness (of) my own possibilities. This means that behind that door a spectacle is presented as "to be seen," a conversation as "to be heard."
...
But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me. What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure - modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective cogito.
First of all, I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness. It is this irruption of the self which has been most often described: I see myself because somebody sees me - as it is usually expressed.
...
Only the reflective consciousness has the self directly for an object. The unreflective consciousness does not apprehend the person directly or as its object; the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other. This means that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself. I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other.

If it helps, just try to imagine yourself parallel parking into a super tight space while a crowd of people watches.

Oh really? It bothers you that Seneca is Roman and Agamemnon is Greek, but he's drawn as a Roman? Not very Stoic of you.