The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But
Solitary though we may have become, we haven't of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, thi...
Onszelf beschouwen als het middelpunt van het heelal, de huidige tijd als het hoogtepunt van de geschiedenis en onze geplande vergaderingen als gebeurtenissen van het grootst mogelijke gewicht, voorbi...
One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love...
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
Journeys are the midwives of thought
Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things th...
Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free f...
Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person.
A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.
Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your partner is merely an idiot to thinking that they are that wonderfully c...
It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a...
It seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved.
You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is—and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in m...
We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integra...
We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
Uma pessoa nunca é boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.
The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The...