We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.
We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths...
The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.
The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.
The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than a cliche life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a...
Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
Our ego or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening...
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite...
He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective....
چگونه این آگاهی مانع از عاشق شدن من نشد؟ زیرا غیرمنطقی و کودکانه بودن ِ نیازم بر تمایلم به باور آن می چربید. آگاه بودم که از خود بی خودی عاشقانه چه خلایی را می توانست پر کند. می دانستم وقتی انگشت روی...
The imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience’.
With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our...
We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration...
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon...
The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put...
The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization will dare to acknowledge – because it would at a stroke exclude half of its speculations and disappointments – is that in...