Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.
Workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hyst...
Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. (p 205)
Antik dönemde filozoflar,insanın mutlu olabilmesi için hangi maddi koşulların gerekli hangilerinin gereksiz olduğu konusunda ateşli tartışmalar girmişlerdir.Örneğin Epikür, insana yalnızca yemek ve ba...
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
We take this idea of love (being loved, rather than loving) with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our...
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is op...
Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe's elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn't love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that sho...
Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her f...
If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chi...
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardur and paradoxes - than our travels. They express, how...
At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to underst...
A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. Beauty is the promise of happiness, he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualiti...
I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that you've got industrial capitalism on one side and romantic love on the other. Those, along with non-in...
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.