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.

The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.

The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.

Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he...

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all...

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive...

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a...

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry...

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

To live in modernity–an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news–is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason...

Partially undermining the manufacturer’s ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to...

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a...

Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by...

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

It is hope–with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet–that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and...

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond...

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...

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations….Most of...

We never envy another’s achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw...

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor...

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one...

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

Onszelf beschouwen als het middelpunt van het heelal, de huidige tijd als het hoogtepunt van de geschiedenis en onze geplande vergaderingen als gebeurtenissen van het grootst mogelijke gewicht, voorbijgaan aan de lessen die begraafplaatsen ons...

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have...

If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people’s tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its...