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...