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For All His Understanding Of Worldly Concerns, When It Came To Fathoming The Deeper Meaning Of His Own Furious Activity, Sir Bob Displayed The Sort Of Laziness For Which He Himself Had No Patience In Others. He Appeared To Have Only A Passing Interest In The Overall Purpose Of His Financial Accumulation.

-Alain De Botton

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For All His Understanding

Alain De Botton

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For All His Understanding Of Worldly Concerns, When It Came To Fathoming The Deeper Meaning Of His Own Furious Activity, Sir Bob Displayed The Sort Of Laziness For Which He Himself Had No Patience In Others. He Appeared To Have Only A Passing Interest In The Overall Purpose Of His Financial Accumulation.

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I Learnt To Stop Fantasising About The Perfect Job Or The Perfect Relationship Because That Can Actually Be An Excuse For Not Living.

Perhaps The Easiest People To Fall In Love With Are Those About Whom We Know Nothing. Romances Are Never As Pure As Those We Imagine During Long Train Journeys, As We Secretly Contemplate A Beautiful Person Who Is Gazing Out Of The Window – A Perfect Love Story Interrupted Only When The Beloved Looks Back Into The Carriage And Starts Up A Dull Conversation About The Excessive Price Of The On-board Sandwiches With A Neighbour Or Blows Her Nose Aggressively Into A Handkerchief.

Falling In Love

The Degree Of Sympathy We Feel Regarding Another's Fiasco Is Directly Proportional To How Easy Or Difficult It Is For Us To Imagine Ourselves, Under Like Circumstances, Making A Similar Mistake.

It's As Though Either You Accept [religious] Doctrine And Then You Can Have All The Nice Stuff, Or You Reject The Doctrine And You're Living In Some Kind Of Spiritual Wasteland Under The Guidance Of Cnn And Walmart.

Only By Declaring A Book Completely Finished Can One Start To See How Much Remains To Be Done On It.

You Normally Have To Be Bashed About A Bit By Life To See The Point Of Daffodils, Sunsets And Uneventful Nice Days.

Our Disrespect For Thinking: Someone Sitting In A Chair, Gazing Out Of A Window Blankly, Always Described As 'doing Nothing'.

I Am Conscious Of Trying To Stretch The Boundaries Of Non-fiction Writing. It's Always Surprised Me How Little Attention Many Non-fiction Writers Pay To The Formal Aspects Of Their Work.

Artistic Accounts Involve Severe Abbreviations Of What Reality Will Force Upon Us.

We May Seek A Fortune For No Greater Reason Than To Secure The Respect And Attention Of People Who Would Otherwise Look Straight Through Us.

What We Find Exotic Abroad May Be What We Hunger For In Vain At Home.

Most Of Our Childhood Is Stored Not In Photos, But In Certain Biscuits, Lights Of Day, Smells, Textures Of Carpet.

Every Fall Into Love Involves The Triumph Of Hope Over Self-knowledge. We Fall In Love Hoping We Won't Find In Another What We Know Is In Ourselves, All The Cowardice, Weakness, Laziness, Dishonesty, Compromise, And Stupidity. We Throw A Cordon Of Love Around The Chosen One And Decide That Everything Within It Will Somehow Be Free Of Our Faults. We Locate Inside Another A Perfection That Eludes Us Within Ourselves, And Through Our Union With The Beloved Hope To Maintain (against The Evidence Of All Self-knowledge) A Precarious Faith In Our Species.

Falling In Love

It Seems That Most Of Us Could Benefit From A Brush With A Near-fatal Disaster To Help Us Recognise The Important Things That We Are Too Defeated Or Embittered To Recognise From Day To Day.

The Pleasure We Derive From Journeys Is Perhaps Dependent More On The Mindset With Which We Travel Than On The Destination We Travel To.

People Who Hold Important Positions In Society Are Commonly Labelled "somebodies," And Their Inverse "nobodies"-both Of Which Are, Of Course, Nonsensical Descriptors, For We Are All, By Necessity, Individuals With Distinct Identities And Comparable Claims On Existence. Such Words Are Nevertheless An Apt Vehicle For Conveying The Disparate Treatment Accorded To Different Groups. Those Without Status Are All But Invisible: They Are Treated Brusquely By Others, Their Complexities Trampled Upon And Their Singularities Ignored.

Why, Then, If Expensive Things Cannot Bring Us Remarkable Joy, Are We So Powerfully Drawn To Them?

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 One-that We Have Within Us A Precious, Childlike, Vulnerable Core Which We Should Nourish And Nurture On Its Turbulent Journey Through Life.

Someone Who Has Thought Rationally And Deeply About How The Body Works Is Likely To Arrive At Better Ideas About How To Be Healthy Than Someone Who Has Followed A Hunch. Medicine Presupposes A Hierarchy Between The Confusion The Layperson Will Be In About What Is Wrong With Him, And The More Accurate Knowledge Available To Doctors Reasoning Logically. At The Heart Of Epicureanism Is The Thought That We Are As Bad At Answering The Question "what Will Make Me Happy?" As "what Will Make Me Healthy?" Our Souls Do Not Spell Out Their Troubles.

Anyone Who Isn't Embarrassed Of Who They Were Last Year Probably Isn't Learning Enough.

So Many Complaints Boil Down To The Belly Ache Of The Fragile, Mortal, Ignored Ego In A Vast And Indifferent Universe.

Those Who Divorce Aren't Necessarily The Most Unhappy, Just Those Neatly Able To Believe Their Misery Is Caused By One Other Person.

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 Much Of The World Is Opposed To Our Allegiances. We Need Our Rooms To Align Us To Desirable Versions Of Ourselves And To Keep Alive The Important, Evanescent Sides Of Us.

Everyone Returns Us To A Different Sense Of Ourselves, For We Become A Little Of Who They Think We Are.

Social Media Has Lots Of Benefits, But Compared To Christianity, It Tends To Group People By Interests. Religion Puts You With People Who Have Nothing In Common Except That You're Human.

I Assemble My Ideas In Pieces On A Computer File, Then Gradually Find A Place For Them On A Piece Of Scaffolding I Erect.

Do You Love Me Enough That I May Be Weak With You? Everyone Loves Strength, But Do You Love Me For My Weakness? That Is The Real Test.

Socrates, On Being Insulted In The Marketplace, Asked By A Passerby, "don't You Worry About Being Called Names?" Retorted, "why? Do You Think I Should Resent It If An Ass Had Kicked Me?

My Writing Always Came Out Of A Very Personal Place, Out Of An Attempt To Stay Sane.

The Problem Isn't So Much Finding Good Ideas (there Is No Shortage) As Embedding The Ones We Have Into Everyday Practice.

We Fall In Love Because We Long To Escape From Ourselves With Someone As Beautiful, Intelligent, And Witty As We Are Ugly, Stupid, And Dull. But What If Such A Perfect Being Should One Day Turn Around And Decide They Will Love Us Back? We Can Only Be Somewhat Shocked-how Can They Be As Wonderful As We Had Hoped When They Have The Bad Taste To Approve Of Someone Like Us?

Falling In Love

If The Behaviour Of Babies And Small Children Is Any Guide, We Emerge Into The World With Our Tendencies To Imbalance Already Well Entrenched. In Our Playpens And High Chairs, We Are Rarely Far From Displaying Either Hysterical Happiness Or Savage Disappointment, Love Or Rage, Mania Or Exhaustion--and, Despite The Growth Of A More Temperate Exterior In Adulthood, We Seldom Succeed In Laying Claim To Lasting Equilibrium, Traversing Our Lives Like Stubbornly Listing Ships On Choppy Seas.

The Best Cure For One's Bad Tendencies Is To See Them In Action In Another Person.

We Feel Something, And Reach Out For The Nearest Phrase Or Hum With Which To Communicate, But Which Fails To Do Justice To What Has Induced Us To Do So....we Stay On The Outside Of Our Impressions, As If Staring At Them Through A Frosted Window, Superficially Related To Them, Yet Estranged From Whatever Has Eluded Casual Definition.

What Am I Supposed To Do Here? What Am I Supposed To Think?

Because The Rhythm Of Conversation Makes No Allowance For Dead Periods, Because The Presence Of Others Calls For Continuous Responses, We Are Left To Regret The Inanity Of What We Say, And The Missed Opportunity Of What We Do Not.

If It Is True That Love Is The Pursuit In Another Of Qualities We Lack In Ourselves, Then In Our Love Of Someone From Another Culture, One Ambition May Be To Weld Ourselves More Closely To Values Missing From Our Own Culture.

Unhappiness Can Stem From Having Only One Perspective To Play With.

According To One Influential Wing Of Modern Secular Society There Are Few More Disreputable Fates Than To End Up Being 'like Everyone Else' For 'everyone Else' Is A Category That Comprises The Mediocre And The Conformist, The Boring And The Suburban. The Goal Of All Right-thinking People Should Be To Mark Themselves Off From The Crowd And 'stand Out' In Whatever Way Their Talents Allow.

Secular Society

The Media Insists On Taking What Someone Didn't Mean To Say As Being Far Closer To The Truth Than What They Did.

The Genius Of Religions Is That They Structure The Inner Life.

We Wanted To Test Each Other's Capacity For Survival: Only If We Had Tried In Vain To Destroy One Another Would We Know We Were Safe.

There Are Things That Are Not Spoken About In Polite Society. Very Quickly In Most Conversations You'll Reach A Moment Where Someone Goes, 'oh, That's A Bit Heavy,' Or 'eew, Disgusting.' And Literature Is A Place Where That Stuff Goes; Where People Whisper To Each Other Across Books, The Writer To The Reader. I Think That Stops You Feeling Lonely – In The Deeper Sense, Lonely.

We Are All More Intelligent Than We Are Capable, And Awareness Of The Insanity Of Love Has Never Saved Anyone From The Disease.

People Only Get Really Interesting When They Start To Rattle The Bars Of Their Cages.

It Would Be Foolish To Describe The Logistics Hub As Merely Ugly, For It Has The Horrifying, Soulless, Immaculate Beauty Characteristic Of Many Of The Workplaces Of The Modern World.

Art Cannot Single-handedly Create Enthusiasm... It Merely Contributes To Enthusiasm And Guides Us To Be More Conscious Of Feelings That We Might Previously Have Experienced Only Tentatively Or Hurriedly.

The Very Act Of Drawing An Object, However Badly, Swiftly Takes The Drawer From A Woolly Sense Of What The Object Looks Like To A Precise Awareness Of Its Component Parts And Particularities.

The Telephone Becomes An Instrument Of Torture In The Demonic Hands Of A Beloved Who Doesn't Call.

In A Secularising World, Art Has Replaced Religion As A Touchstone Of Our Reverence And Devotion.

Instead Of Bringing Back 1600 Plants, We Might Return From Our Journeys With A Collection Of Small Unfêted But Life-enhancing Thoughts.

A Notorious Inability To Express Emotions Makes Human Beings The Only Animals Capable Of Suicide.

It Looks Like It’s Wasting Time, But Literature Is Actually The Ultimate Time-saver - Because It Gives Us Access To A Range Of Emotions And Events That It Would Take You Years, Decades, Millennia To Try To Experience Directly. Literature Is The Greatest Reality Simulator - A Machine That Puts You Through Infinitely More Situations Than You Can Ever Directly Witness.

Being Incomprehensible Offers Unparalleled Protection Against Having Nothing To Say...but Writing With Simplicity Requires Courage, For There Is A Danger That One Will Be Overlooked, Dismissed As Simpleminded By Those With A Tenacious Belief That The Impassable Prose Is A Hallmark Of Intelligence.

Don't Despair: Despair Suggests You Are In Total Control And Know What Is Coming. You Don't - Surrender To Events With Hope.

Travel Agents Would Be Wiser To Ask Us What We Hope To Change About Our Lives Rather Than Simply Where We Wish To Go.

Curiosity Might Be Pictured As Being Made Up Of Chains Of Small Questions Extending Outwards, Sometimes Over Huge Distances, From A Central Hub Composed Of A Few Blunt, Large Questions.

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

Nowhere Was The Airport's Charm More Concentrated Than On The Screens Placed At Intervals Across The Terminal Which Announced, In Deliberately Workmanlike Fonts, The Itineraries Of Aircraft About To Take To The Skies. These Screens Implied A Feeling Of Infinite And Immediate Possibility: They Suggested The Ease With Which We Might Impulsively Approach A Ticket Desk And, Within A Few Hours, Embark For A Country Where The Call To Prayer Rang Out Over Shuttered Whitewashed Houses, Where We Understood Nothing Of The Language And Where No One Knew Our Identities.

Let's Say You Went To Harvard Or Oxford Or Cambridge, And You Said, 'i've Come Here Because I'm In Search Of Morality, Guidance And Consolation; I Want To Know How To Live,' - They Would Show You The Way To The Insane Asylum.

Every Realistic Picture Represents A Choice As To Which Features Of Reality Should Be Given Prominence; No Painting Ever Captures The Whole.

Not Everyone Is Worth Listening To.

We Should Keep A Careful Diary Of Our Moments Of Envy: They Are Our Covert Guides To What We Should Try To Do Next.

Our Minds Are Susceptible To The Influence Of External Voices Telling Us What We Require To Be Satisfied, Voices That May Drown Out The Faint Sounds Emitted By Our Souls And Distract Us From The Careful, Arduous Task Of Accurately Naming Our Priorities.

William James Once Made An Acute Point About The Relationship Between Happiness And Expectation. He Argued That Satisfaction With Ourselves Does Not Require Us To Succeed In Every Endeavour. We Are Not Always Humiliated By Failing; We Are Humiliated Only If We First Invest Our Pride And Sense Of Worth In A Given Achievement And Then Do Not Reach It.

Her Lie Was Symptomatic Of A Certain Pride She Took In Mocking The Romantic, In Being Unsentimental, Matter-of-fact, Stoic; Yet At Heart She Was The Oppo Site: Idealistic, Dreamy, Giving, And Deeply Attached To Everything She Liked Verbally To Dismiss As "mushy.

The True Nature Of Bureaucracy May Be Nowhere More Obvious To The Observer Than In A Developing Country, For Only There Will It Still Be Made Manifest By The Full Complement Of Documents, Files, Veneered Desks And Cabinets - Which Convey The Strict And Inverse Relationship Between Productivity And Paperwork.

Developing Countries

For All His Understanding Of Worldly Concerns, When It Came To Fathoming The Deeper Meaning Of His Own Furious Activity, Sir Bob Displayed The Sort Of Laziness For Which He Himself Had No Patience In Others. He Appeared To Have Only A Passing Interest In The Overall Purpose Of His Financial Accumulation.

Being Funny Should Be An Incidental Byproduct Of Trying To Get To Something Truthful, Not A Destination In Itself.

Only As We Mature Does Affection Begin To Depend On Achievement.

If Optimism Is Important, It's Because Many Outcomes Are Determined By How Much Of It We Bring To The Task. It Is An Important Ingredient Of Success. This Flies In The Face Of The Elite View That Talent Is The Primary Requirement Of A Good Life, But In Many Cases The Difference Between Success And Failure Is Determined By Nothing More Than Our Sense Of What Is Possible And The Energy We Can Muster To Convince Others Of Our Due. We Might Be Doomed Not By A Lack Of Skill, But By An Absence Of Hope!

Most Good Thinking Has Its Origin In Fear.

One Of Our Major Flaws, And Causes Of Unhappiness, Is That We Find It Hard To Take Note Of Appreciate And Be Grateful For What Is Always Around Us. We Suffer Because We Lose Sight Of The Value Of What Is Before Us And Yearn, Often Unfairly, For The Imagined Attraction Elsewhere.

Memory Is... Similar To Anticipation: An Instrument Of Simplification And Selection.

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 Teasing The Buyers, We May Blame The Society In Which They Lived For Setting Up A Situation Where The Purchase Of Ornate Cabinets Felt Psychologically Necessary And Rewarding, Where Respect Was Dependent On Baroque Displays. Rather Than A Tale Of Greed, The History Of Luxury Could More Accurately Be Read As A Record Of Emotional Trauma. It Is The Legacy Of Those Who Have Felt Pressured By The Disdain Of Others To Add An Extraordinary Amount To Their Bare Selves In Order To Signal That They Too May Lay A Claim To Love.

Gaffe-focused Journalism: Revenge Of Intelligent People Who Know True Evils Are Out There But Lack The Access/time To Get To Them.

The Materialistic View Of Happiness Of Our Age Starkly Revealed In Our Understanding Of The Word "luxury.

The Arab-israeli Conflict Is Also In Many Ways A Conflict About Status: It's A War Between Two Peoples Who Feel Deeply Humiliated By The Other, Who Want The Other To Respect Them. Battles Over Status Can Be Even More Intractable Than Those Over Land Or Water Or Oil.

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.

Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion And Bohemia Have Never Sought To Do Away Entirely With The Status Hierarchy; They Have Attemptee, Rather, To Institute New Kinds Of Hierarchies Based On Sets Of Values Unrecognised By, And Critical Of, Those Of The Majority.. They Have Provided Us With Persuasive And Consoling Reminders That There Is More Than One Way Of Succeeding In Life.

Sweetness Is The Opposite Of Machismo, Which Is Everywhere-and I Really Don't Get On With Machismo. I'm Interested In Sensitivity, And Weakness, And Fear, And Anxiety, Because I Think That, At The End Of The Day, Behind Our Masks, That's What We Are.

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 Content - A Way, To Put It In More Abstract Terms, To Think About Fathers Without Upsetting My Respectful Memory Of My Own Father. I Recognized That My Continuing Resistance To Theories Of An Afterlife Or Of Heavenly Residents Was No Justification For Giving Up On The Music, Buildings, Prayers, Rituals, Feasts, Shrines, Pilgrimages, Communal Meals And Illustrated Manuscripts Of The Faiths.

There Are People Who Say, 'oh This Guy Is Quite Thick.' I Think The Reason Is That, Increasingly, I Don't Mind Being Simple In Terms Of Literary Expression. Others Say, 'no, No, No. He Went To Cambridge. He Got A Good Degree. He Must Be Einstein.'

The Dream Of The News Is That It Makes Us Care About Other People And Situations. But We Cannot Identify With People To Whom We Haven't Been Introduced. Humans Will Only Respond To Art, To People Who Are Skilled In Making You Care.

There May Be Significant Things To Learn About People By Looking At What Annoys Them Most.

Significant Things

As The Determinants Of High Status Keep Shifting, So, Too, Naturally, Will The Triggers Of Status Anxiety Be Altered.

Serious Journalists Often Imagine Society Is Adrift Because People Don't Know Certain Things. Yet Often, They Know But Just Don't Care. So The Task Of Serious Journalism Isn't Just To Lay Out Truths. It Is To Make Vital Truths Compelling To A Big Audience.

Love Is An Incurable Disease. In Love, There Is Permanent Suffering. Those Who Love And Those Who Are Happy Are Not The Same.

The Real Issue Is Not Whether Baking Biscuits Is Meaningful, But The Extent To Which The Activity Can Seem To Be So After It Has Been Continuously Stretched And Subdivided Across Five Thousand Lives.

Every Adult Life Could Be Said To Be Defined By Two Great Love Stories: The Story Of Our Quest For Sexual Love And The Story Of Our Quest For Love From The World.

Our Bodies Hold Our Minds Hostage To Their Whims And Rhythms.

We Should Read Other People's Books In Order To Learn What We Feel; It Is Our Own Thoughts We Should Be Developing, Even If It Is Another Writer's Thought That Help Us To Do So.

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 Plateau On Which We Will Live Out The Rest Of Our Lives; We Are Not Reminded That Soon After Gaining The Summit, We Will Be Called Down Again Into Fresh Lowlands Of Anxiety And Desire.

It's Hard Loving Those Who Don't Much Like Themselves: "if You're So Great, Why Would You Think I'm So Great.

Journeys Are The Midwives Of Thought. Few Places Are More Conducive To Internal Conversations Than A Moving Plane, Ship Or Train. There Is An Almost Quaint Correlation Between What Is In Front Of Our Eyes And The Thoughts We Are Able To Have In Our Heads: Large Thoughts At Times Requiring Large Views, New Thoughts New Places. Introspective Reflections Which Are Liable To Stall Are Helped Along By The Flow Of The Landscape. The Mind May Be Reluctant To Think Properly When Thinking Is All It Is Supposed To Do.

I'm Also Interested In The Modern Suggestion That You Can Have A Combination Of Love And Sex In A Marriage - Which No Previous Society Has Ever Believed.

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 As Necklace Beads Without A Connecting Chain.

The Mind Does Most Of Its Best Thinking When We Aren't There. The Answers Are There In The Morning.

Paying Tax Should Be Framed As A Glorious Civic Duty Worthy Of Gratitude - Not A Punishment For Making Money.

He Was Marked Out By His Relentless Ability To Find Fault With Others' Mediocrity - Suggesting That A Certain Type Of Intelligence May Be At Heart Nothing More Or Less Than A Superior Capacity For Dissatisfaction.

Being Content Is Perhaps No Less Easy Than Playing The Violin Well: And Requires No Less Practice.

How Do The Stems Connect To The Roots?' 'where Is The Mist Coming From?' 'why Does One Tree Seem Darker Than Another?' These Questions Are Implicitly Asked And Answered In The Process Of Sketching.

Politics Is So Difficult, It's Generally Only People Who Aren't Quite Up To The Task Who Feel Convinced They Are.

Intimacy Is The Capacity To Be Rather Weird With Someone - And Finding That That's Ok With Them.

The Only Way To Be Happy Is To Realise How Much Depends On How You Look At Things

Though Debts Are Condemned In The Financial World, The World Of Friendship And Love May Perversely Depend On Well-managed Debts.

Love And Friendship

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 Coup De Foudre A Certain Willful Exaggeration Of The Qualities Of The Beloved, An Exaggeration Which Distracts Us From Our Habitual Pessimism And Focuses Our Energies On Someone In Whom We Can Believe In A Way We Have Never Believed In Ourselves?

Falling In Love

A World Where A Majority Had Imbibed The Lessons Implicit Within Tragic Art Would Be One In Which The Consequences Of Our Failures Would Necessarily Cease To Weigh Upon Us So Heavily.

Happiness Is Impossible For Longer Than 15 Minutes. We Are The Descendants Of Creatures Who, Above All Else, Worried.

Rather Than Saying 'i Hate Mess', It Might Draw More Compassion To Say, 'mess Terrifies Me As A Harbinger Of Catastrophe'.

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

Dreams Reveal We Never Quite Get 'over' Anything: It's All Still In There Somewhere.

We Keep A Special Place In Our Hearts For People Who Refuse To Be Impressed By Us.

Despite Its Maddeningly Vague, Inarticulate Form, Anxiety Is Almost Always Trying To Tell You Something Useful And Apposite.

To Look At The Paper Is To Raise A Seashell To One's Ear And To Be Overwhelmed By The Roar Of Humanity.

Not Being Understood May Be Taken As A Sign That There Is Much In One To Understand.

All Tours Are Filled With Humiliation. My Publisher Once Hired A Private Jet To Fly Me To A Venue Where 1,000 People Were Waiting. It Almost Bankrupted Him.

Objectively Good Spaces To Work Rarely End Up Being So; In Their Faultlessness, Quiet And Well-equipped Studios Have A Habit Of Rendering The Fear Of Failure Overwhelming. Original Thoughts Are Like Shy Animals. We Sometimes Have To Look The Other Way - Towards A Busy Street Or Terminal - Before They Run Out Of Their Burrows.

The Origins And Travels Of Our Purchases Remain Matters Of Indifference, Although To The More Imaginative At Least A Slight Dampness At The Bottom Of A Carton, Or An Obscure Code Printed Along A Computer Cable, May Hint At Processes Of Manufacture And Transport Nobler And More Mysterious, More Worthy Of Wonder And Study, Than The Very Goods Themselves.

The More Familiar Two People Become, The More The Language They Speak Together Departs From That Of The Ordinary, Dictionary-defined Discourse. Familiarity Creates A New Language, An In-house Language Of Intimacy That Carries Reference To The Story The Two Lovers Are Weaving Together And That Cannot Be Readily Understood By Others.

The Longing For A Destiny Is No Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life. All Too Often Forced To Share Our Bed With Those Who Cannot Fathom Our Soul, Can We Not Be Forgiven If We Believe Ourselves Fated To Stumble One Day Upon The Man Or Woman Of Our Dreams.

Pick Up Any Newspaper Or Magazine, Open The Tv, And You'll Be Bombarded With Suggestions Of How To Have A Successful Life. Some Of These Suggestions Are Deeply Unhelpful To Our Own Projects And Priorities - And We Should Take Care.

You Need A Long Hard Day's Work To Reveal The Logic Of The Craving For Very Bad Tv And Alcohol.

One Of The Best Protections Against Disappointment Is To Have A Lot Going On.

Most Of Us Still Caged Within Careers Chosen For Us By Our Not Entirely Worldly 18-22 Year Old Selves.

We Are Presented With An Unpleasant Choice Between Either Committing To Peculiar Concepts About Immaterial Deities Or Letting Go Entirely Of A Host Of Consoling, Subtle Or Just Charming Rituals For Which We Struggle To Find Equivalents In Secular Society.

Secular Society

The Longing For Destiny Is Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life.

When I See Someone Like Richard Dawkins, I See My Father. I Grew Up With That. I'm Basically The Child Of Richard Dawkins.

Architects Themselves Tend To Shy Away From The Word, Preferring Instead To Talk About The Manipulation Of Space.

You Have To Be Quite Heavily Invested In Someone To Do Them The Honour Of Telling Them You're Annoyed With Them.

Unnatural To Expect That Learning To Be Happy Should Be Any Easier Than, Say, Learning To Play The Violin Or Require Any Less Practice.

Despite The Best Efforts Of Critics And The Hopes Of Authors, Our Tastes In Books Are Probably As Inherent & Unbudgeable As Those In Food.

The Difference Between Hope And Despair Is A Different Way Of Telling Stories From The Same Facts.

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 Any Of Our Desires, But Rather To Suggest That We Should Perhaps Build Into Our Strivings An Awareness Of The Way Our Goals Promise Us A Respite And A Resolution That They Cannot, By Definition, Deliver.

It Is Striking How Much More Seriously We Are Likely To Be Taken After We Have Been Dead A Few Centuries.

The Universe Is Large And We Are Tiny, Without The Need For Further Religious Superstructure. One Can Have So-called Spiritual Moments Without Belief In The Spirit.

Writing Isn’t A Career Choice. It’s Self-medication That Over Time Precipitates The Madness It Was Meant To Ward Off.

The Most Unbearable Thing About Many Successful People Is Not - As We Flatteringly Think - How Lazy They Are, But How Hard They Work.

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 Holding Onto." (p123) Architecture Of Happiness

Never Too Late To Learn Some Embarrassingly Basic, Stupidly Obvious Things About Oneself.

Many Moments In Religion Seem Attractive To Me Even Though I Can't Believe In Any Of It.

At The Beginning Of Human History, As We Struggled To Light Fires And To Chisel Fallen Trees Into Rudimentary Canoes, Who Could Have Predicted That Long After We Had Managed To Send Men To The Moon And Areoplanes To Australasia, We Would Still Have Such Trouble Knowing How To Tolerate Ourselves, Forgive Our Loved Ones, And Apologise For Our Tantrums?

Life Gives Us No Such Handy Markers - A Storm Comes, And Far From This Being A Harbinger Of Death And Collapse, During Its Course A Person Discovers Love And Truth, Beauty And Happiness, The Rain Lashing At The Windows All The While.

True Love Is A Lack Of Desire To Check One's Smartphone In Another's Presence.

There Are Selections So Acute That They Come To Define A Place, With The Result That We Can No Longer Travel Through That Landscape Without Being Reminded Of What A Great Artist Noticed There.

In The Gap Between Who We Wish One Day To Be And Who We Are At Present, Must Come Pain, Anxiety, Envy And Humiliation.

We May Not Agree With What Religions Are Trying To Teach Us, But We Can Admire The Institutional Way In Which They're Doing It.

I Feel That The Great Challenge Of Our Time Is The Communication Of Ideas.

Rage Is Caused By A Conviction, Almost Comic In Its Optimistic Origins (however Tragic In Its Effects), That A Given Frustration Has Not Been Written Into The Contract Of Life.

Literature Deeply Stands Opposed To The Dominant Value System-the One That Rewards Money And Power. Writers Are On The Other Side-they Make Us Sympathetic To Ideas And Feelings That Are Of Deep Importance But Can’t Afford Airtime In A Commercialized, Status-consciou S, And Cynical World.

What I Want To Argue For Is Not That We Should Give Up On Our Ideas Of Success, But That We Should Make Sure That They Are Our Own. We Should Focus In On Our Ideas And Make Sure That We Own Them, That We're Truly The Authors Of Our Own Ambitions. Because It's Bad Enough Not Getting What You Want, But It's Even Worse To Have An Idea Of What It Is You Want And Find Out At The End Of The Journey That It Isn't, In Fact, What You Wanted All Along.

We Study Biology, Physics, Movements Of Glaciers... Where Are The Classes On Envy, Feeling Wronged, Despair, Bitterness.

Our Capacity To Draw Happiness From Aesthetic Objects Or Material Goods In Fact Seems Critically Dependent On Our First Satisfying A More Important Range Of Emotional Or Psychological Needs, Among Them The Need For Understanding, For Love, Expression And Respect.

A Virtuous, Ordinary Life, Striving For Wisdom But Never Far From Folly, Is Achievement Enough.

We Read The Weird Tales In Newspapers To Crowd Out The Even Weirder Stuff Inside Us.

In Britain, Because I Live Here, I Can Also Run Into Problems Of Envy And Competition. But All This Is Just In A Day's Work For A Writer. You Can't Put Stuff Out There Without Someone Calling You A Complete Fool. Oh, Well.

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, To A Helpful Vision Of Ourselves. We Arrange Around Us Material Forms Which Communicate To Us What We Need — But Are At Constant Risk Of Forgetting What We Need — Within. We Turn To Wallpaper, Benches, Paintings And Streets To Staunch The Disappearance Of Our True Selves.

By Travelling Across Frontiers, On Horseback And In The Imagination, Montaigne Invited Us To To Exchange Local Prejudices And The Self Division They Induced For Less Constraining Identities As Citizens Of The World.

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 Mockery, Being Intelligent Enough To Be Unable Fully To Believe In His Own Claims To Significance. He Might, In A Past Life, Have Been A Particularly Canny And Sharp-tongued Royal Advisor.

Work Finally Begins When The Fear Of Doing Nothing Exceeds The Fear Of Doing It Badly.

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?

Unrequited Love May Be Painful, But It Is Safely Painful, Because It Does Not Involve Inflicting Damage On Anyone But Oneself, A Private Pain That Is As Bittersweet As It Is Self-induced. But As Soon As Love Is Reciprocated, One Must Be Prepared To Give Up The Passivity Of Simply Being Hurt And Take On The Responsibility Of Perpetrating Hurt Oneself.

Writing A Book Has About It Some Of The Anxiety Of Telling A Joke And Having To Wait Several Years To Know Whether Or Not It Was Funny.

On Paper, Being Good Sounds Great But A Lot Depends On The Atmosphere Of The Workplace Or Community We Live In. We Tend To Become Good Or Bad Depending On The Cues Sent Out Within A Particular Space.

I Was Uncomfortable Writing Fiction. My Love Was The Personal Essay Rather Than The Novel.

If Our Lives Are Dominated By A Search For Happiness, Then Perhaps Few Activities Reveal As Much About The Dynamics Of This Quest - In All Its Ardour And Paradoxes - Than Our Travels.

In Reality, The Likelihood Of Reaching The Pinnacle Of Capitalist Society Today Is Only Marginally Better Than Were The Chances Of Being Accepted Into The French Nobility Four Centuries Ago, Though At Least An Aristocratic Age Was Franker, And Therefore Kinder, About The Odds. It Did Not Relentlessly Play Up The Possibilities Open To All, And So, In Turn, Did Not Cruelly Equate An Ordinary Life With A Failed One.

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 Own Achievements. Ruins Pose A Direct Challenge To Our Concern With Power And Rank, With Bustle And Fame. They Puncture The Inflated Folly Of Our Exhaustive And Frenetic Pursuit Of Wealth.

In Their Different Ways, Art And Philosophy Help Us, In Schopenhauer's Words, To Turn Pain Into Knowledge.

It's Perhaps Easier Now Than Ever Before To Make A Good Living; It's Perhaps Harder Than Ever Before To Stay Calm, To Be Free Of Career Anxiety.

As Adults, We Try To Develop The Character Traits That Would Have Rescued Our Parents.

To Be Loved By Someone Is To Realize How Much They Share The Same Needs That Lie At The Heart Of Our Own Attraction To Them. Albert Camus Suggested That We Fall In Love With People Because, From The Outside, They Look So Whole, Physically Whole And Emotionally 'together' - When Subjectively We Feel Dispersed And Confused. We Would Not Love If There Were No Lack Within Us, But We Are Offended By The Discovery Of A Similar Lack In The Other. Expecting To Find The Answer, We Find Only The Duplicate Of Our Own Problem.

Falling In Love

The Most Attractive Are Not Those Who Allow Us To Kiss Them At Once [we Soon Feel Ungrateful] Or Those Who Never Allow Us To Kiss Them [we Soon Forget Them], But Those Who Coyly Lead Us Between The Two Extremes.

A Lump Rises In Our Throat At The Sight Of Beauty From An Implicit Knowledge That The Happiness It Hints At Is The Exception.

Art Holds Out The Promise Of Inner Wholeness.

We Don't Really Learn Anything Properly Until There Is A Problem, Until We Are In Pain, Until Something Fails To Go As We Had Hoped ... We Suffer, Therefore We Think.

It Seemed An Advantage To Be Traveling Alone. Our Responses To The World Are Crucially Moulded By The Company We Keep, For We Temper Our Curiosity To Fit In With The Expectations Of Others...being Closely Observed By A Companion Can Also Inhibit Our Observation Of Others; Then, Too, We May Become Caught Up In Adjusting Ourselves To The Companion's Questions And Remarks, Or Feel The Need To Make Ourselves Seem More Normal Than Is Good For Our Curiosity.

Company We Keep

Perhaps It Is True That We Do Not Really Exist Until There Is Someone There To See Us Existing, We Cannot Properly Speak Until There Is Someone Who Can Understand What We Are Saying In Essence, We Are Not Wholly Alive Until We Are Loved.

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

Reputation Matters So Much Only Because People So Seldom Think For Themselves.

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

Rather Than Employing It As A Supplement To Active, Conscious Seeing, They Used The Medium As A Substitute, Paying Less Attention To The World Than They Had Done Previously, Taking It On Faith That Photography Automatically Assured Them Possession Of It.

The Challenge For A Human Now Is To Be More Interesting To Another Than His Or Her Smartphone.

We Will Cease To Be Angry Once We Cease To Be So Hopeful.

I Am In General A Very Pessimistic Person With An Optimistic, Day To Day Take On Things. The Bare Facts Of Life Are Utterly Terrifying. And Yet, One Can Laugh. Indeed, One Has To Laugh Precisely Because Of The Darkness: The Nervous Laughter Of The Trenches.

Philosophy Had Supplied Socrates With Convictions In Which He Had Been Able To Have Rational, As Opposed To Hysterical, Confidence When Faced With Disapproval.

Religions Are So Subtle, So Complicated, So Intelligent In Many Ways That They're Not Fit To Be Abandoned To The Religious Alone; They're For All Of Us.

We Are Sensitized By The Books We Read. And The More Books We Read, And The Deeper Their Lessons Sink Into Us, The More Pairs Of Glasses We Have. And Those Glasses Enable Us To See Things We Would Have Otherwise Missed.

Let Death Find Us As We Are Building Up Our Matchstick Protests Against Its Waves.

It Is Perhaps Sad Books That Best Console Us When We Are Sad.

The Mind May Be Reluctant To Think Properly When Thinking Is All It Is Supposed To Do; The Task Can Be As Paralysing As Having To Tell A Joke Or Mimic An Accent On Demand.

We Might Have Been Ready To Offer Sympathy, But In Actuality There Were Stronger Reasons To Want To Congratulate Her For Having Found Such A Powerful Motive To Feel Sad. We Should Have Envied Her For Having Located Someone Without Whom She So Firmly Felt She Could Not Survive, Beyond The Gate Let Along In A Bare Student Bedroom In A Suburb Of Rio. If She Had Been Able To View Her Situation From A Sufficient Distance, She Might Have Been Able To Recognise This As One Of The High Points In Her Life.

Man Seems Merely Dust Postponed: The Sublime As An Encounter - Pleasurable, Intoxicating, Even - With Human Weakness In The Face Of Strength, Age And Size Of The Universe.

Once I Began To Consider Everything As Being Of Potential Interest, Objects Released Latent Layers Of Value.

The Inability To Live In The Present Lies In The Fear Of Leaving The Sheltered Position Of Anticipation Or Memory, And So Of Admitting That This Is The Only Life That One Is Ever Likely (heavenly Intervention Aside) To Live.

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 Particular Priority For Secular Americans, Perhaps The Most Anxious And Disappointed People On Earth, For Their Nation Infuses Them With The Most Extreme Hopes About What They May Be Able To Achieve In Their Working Lives And Relationships.

Maturity: The Confidence To Have No Opinions On Many Things.

It Wasn't Only Fanatics And Drunkards Who Began Conversations With Strangers In Public.

People Who Go On To Be Writers Are Those Who Can Forgive Themselves The Horror Of The First Draft.

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