Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian...
Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving...
Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age. They force us to fart and burp, and to abandon sensible plans in order to lie in bed with people, sweating and letting out intense sounds reminiscent...
Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes...
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved
It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happine...
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a cer...
I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
For most of their relationship, Eric avoided paying his due because he knew Alice would pay when he didn't. If he paid only 10 units, she would come up with the other 30. If he didn't feel like drivin...
Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can imagine it, always lo...
Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?
Când ne uităm la cineva (la un înger) din postura unei iubiri neîmpărtăşite şi ne imaginăm plăcerea de a fi în paradis alături de acea persoană, suntem tentaţi să trecem cu vederea un pericol importan...
Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate content...
Cele mai atrăgătoare femei nu sunt cele care ne dau voie să le sărutăm imediat (devenim repede nerecunoscători) și nici cele care nu ne lasă deloc să le sărutăm (le uităm repede), ci cele care ne duc...
Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they...
A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It
A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.