We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more general...
We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor...
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are minist...
There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of c...
There is a certain tyranny about perfection, a certain exhaustion about it even, something that denies the viewer a role in its creation and that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of an unambiguou...
The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious – something of an irony, given the frequency with which the latter have been derided by the former for their a...
The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into...
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the tw...
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language...
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation a...
The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnece...
The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of...
Tendemos a nos apegar a uma noção fixa das emoções, como se existisse uma linha entre amar e não amar que pudesse ser cruzada somente duas vezes, no início e no fim de um relacionamento, em vez de tra...
Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. I began to question everything, she told me, I had to figure out wh...
Secular society has been unfairly impoverished by the loss of an array of practices and themes which atheists typically find it impossible to live with because they seem too closely associated with, t...
Romantik dönem boyuncaruhun hisle bağdaştırıldığından bahsetmiştik; ancak şunu söylemekte yarar var ki çok kısa bir süre sonra his;zevkleri ya da mutlulukları değil de acıları hissetmekle özdeşlerştir...
Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead....