Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It’s often imagined that it’ll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint...
Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of val...
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion...
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for diss...
Beauty is a promise of happiness.
He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of...
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was...
Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.
Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in t...
Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign...
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.