What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith...

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.

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?

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the...

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must...

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work...

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 for signs of boredom or...

We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage...

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

…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)

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception...

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high...

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might...

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural...

In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in...

On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride—or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation—takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to...

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. ‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes...

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that...

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould,...

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which...

One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.

Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious...

Hoe machtig onze technologie en hoe complex onze ondernemingen ook mogen zijn, het opmerkelijkste kenmerk van onze moderne arbeid is uiteindelijk misschien wel iets wat in onszelf zit, een aspect van onze mentaliteit: de wijdverbreide...

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively...

To appreciate life’s small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking...

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in...

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.

What we colloquially call ‘feeling bored’ is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable...

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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...

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material...

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a...

A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.