A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new...
The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you lov...
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy...
The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of ye...
Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of com...
In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philo...
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed...
As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.
The truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity.
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but whi...
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
…it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there. (p.23)
There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership.
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.