Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: ‘Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,’ wrote George Orwell,
But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about f...
Beneath the kiss itself, it is its meaning that interests us—which is why the desire to kiss someone can be decisively reduced (as it may need be, for instance, when two lovers are already married to...
Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decen...
7. The thought was a lonely one: of the error one may find over a single word, an argument not for linguistic pedants but of desperate importance to lovers who need to make themselves understood....
Religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have. They have managed to combine theories about ethics and metap...
For happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.
Creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence: Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little ants … the life of most insects is nothing bu...
Without patience or negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can’t be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee w...
What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the expl...
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired,
We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around...
There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisi...
The signal danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human b...
The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated—I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reas...
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made o...
Seyahatler, dolaylı da olsa, iş ortamının ve ayakta kalma mücadelesinin ağır koşullarından sıyrıldığımızda nasıl bir yaşamımız olacağını, istediğimiz gibi yaşamaktan ne anladığımızı ortaya koyar.
Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.
Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respec...