Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

It is this idea ‘decency’ should be attached to wealth -and ‘indecency” to poverty – that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money...

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life – so he stayed, and did just that.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between...

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick...

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.

There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see...

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order–that windows, doors and other details have...

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.

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...

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.

Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: ‘just give us the money’.

Humboldt’s early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject’s extraordinary curiosity as follows: ‘1) The knowledge of the Earth and...

Just be yourself’ is about the worst advice you can give some people.

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

…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 hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office...

While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim...

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and...

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief...

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover...

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures,...

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay...

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.....

To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.

The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only...

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have,...

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 trouble...

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.