What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have...
As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other … you have the choice: either as little di...
We gaan in op reusachtige, ongrijpbare collectieve projecten, zodat we ons afvragen wat we vorig jaar deden, sterker nog, waar wij zijn gebleven en wat er van ons geworden is. We zien onze verspilde k...
Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is th...
Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal...
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any...
If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes fo...
For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of...
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it
Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is a likely outcome whenever architects skilfully me...
Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of ye...
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.
Mary in Christianity, Isis in ancient Egypt, Demeter in Greece, Venus in Rome and Guan Yin in China have all functioned as conduits to recollections of early tenderness. Their statues often stand in d...
It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.
How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rud...