To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.
Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.
We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed;...
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vi...
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have car...
It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the wid...
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes fo...
Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It's a sign that it's normal it's on track. An...
I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
A lack of love:between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.
What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly 'whole'.
We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even...
That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, i...
Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.