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.

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.