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 song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
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, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
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?
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.
How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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