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

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first – the story of our quest for sexual love – is well known and well charted, its vagaries form...

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and...

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

But the answer isn’t just to intimidate people into consuming more ‘serious’ news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is...

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness…

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the...

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot...

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully...

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with particulars involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social...

Jarenlang kwam ik bij het boodschappen doen langs een huis dat weliswaar een van de lelijkste gebouwen was dat ik ooit heb gezien, maar me ook meer over architectuur heeft geleerd dan menig meesterwerk.

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.

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...