Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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 and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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 of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Not everyone is worth listening to.
Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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