There's something special, even powerful about reading the private thoughts of someone who, at one point, was perhaps the most powerful person on the planet *and didn't want to be*. This is a self-help book of the most inward kind, one that is personal and reflective to a degree that we don't see much in ancient literature. So many evergreen quotes can be pulled from this (and they certainly have been), exemplifying why this has aged better than many other works of its time.