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.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don’t yet know what to do with.

The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

The assumption is that life doesn’t need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form...

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.

Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However...

It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of...

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what...

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another–which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil...

Chi pronuncia parole d’amore è come chi lancia un messaggio in codice con una trasmittente difettosa, senza mai essere sicuro di cosa viene captato (e, ciò nonostante, come un dente di leone che libera infinite...

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every...

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.