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.

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.