Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations h...
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any pos...
Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.
[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated...
Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.
The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by...
To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.
Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have t...
Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...
For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.
What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and u...
The true aspiration of art should be to reduce the need for it. It is not that we should one day lose our devotion to the things that art addresses: beauty, depth of meaning, good relationships, the a...
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demandin...
It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievem...
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive think...
Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
Every fall into love is the triumph of hope over self-knowledge
The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.