In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, with...
In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the alter, a couple would speak thus: We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the wors...
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content...
Hoe machtig onze technologie en hoe complex onze ondernemingen ook mogen zijn, het opmerkelijkste kenmerk van onze moderne arbeid is uiteindelijk misschien wel iets wat in onszelf zit, een aspect van...
Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own tone…. I don’t mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer—and perhaps it’s a...
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and l...
But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known st...
But if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends are often equally bloody. We're familiar with political love that ends in tyranny, where a ruler's firm conviction th...
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong...
Although it often struggles to be heard in respectable circles, there is an alternative to the Christian-Romantic tenet that sex and love should always be inseparable. The libertine position denies an...
A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace...
We may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.
The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a p...
On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status...
این نشانه هوشمندی است که بپذیریم ما هم به لطف و محبت، ثبات و راهنمایی نیاز داریم درست مثل آنچه کودکان ما نیاز دارند.
Wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The
[W]e all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite
While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies....