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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.

-Alain De Botton

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It Seems That Most

Alain De Botton

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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.

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It Is In Dialogue With Pain That Many Beautiful Things Acquire Their Value. Acquaintance With Grief Turns Out To Be One Of The More Unusual Prerequisites Of Architectural Appreciation. We Might, Quite Aside From All Other Requirements, Need To Be A Little Sad Before Buildings Can Properly Touch Us.

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

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.

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

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

It Is Perhaps Sad Books That Best Console Us When We Are Sad, And To Lonely Service Stations That We Should Drive When There Is No One For Us To Hold Or Love.

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

Taking Photographs Can Assuage The Itch For Possession Sparked By The Beauty Of A Place; Our Anxiety Over Losing A Precious Scene Can Decline With Every Click Of The Shutter.

Status Anxiety: A Worry, So Pernicious As To Be Capable Of Ruining Extended Stretches Of Our Lives, That We Are In Danger Of Failing To Conform To The Ideals Of Success Laid Down By Our Society And That We May As A Result Be Stripped Of Dignity And Respect; A Worry That We Are Currently Occupying Too Modest A Rung Or Are About To Fall To A Lower One.

The Lesson? To Respond To The Unexpected And Hurtful Behavior Of Others With Something More Than A Wipe Of The Glasses, To See It As A Chance To Expand Our Understanding.

The Fear Of Saying Something Stupid (which Stupid People Never Have) Has Censored Far More Good Ideas Than Bad Ones.

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.

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

The Good Parent: Someone Who Doesn't Mind, For A Time, Being Hated By Their Children.

We Are Certainly Influenced By Role Models, And If We Are Surrounded By Images Of Beautiful Rich People, We Will Start To Think That To Be Beautiful And Rich Is Very Important - Just As In The Middle Ages, People Were Surrounded By Images Of Religious Piety.

The Company Of Certain People May Excite Our Generosity And Sensitivity, While That Of Others Awakens Our Competitiveness And Envy.

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

It Should Not Be Illiers-combray That We Visit: A Genuine Homage To Proust Would Be To Look At Our World Through His Eyes, Not Look At His World Through Our Eyes.

...if The Beginnings Of Love And Amorous Politics Are Equally Rosy, Then The Ends May Be Equally Bloody.

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, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

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

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

It's Clear To Me That There Is No Good Reason For Many Philosophy Books To Sound As Complicated As They Do.

The Study Of Maps And The Perusal Of Travel Books Aroused In Me A Secret Fascination That Was At Times Almost Irresistible.

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

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.

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

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

One Kind Of Good Book Should Leave You Asking: How Did The Author Know That About Me?

These Inventors Were Elevating The Formulation Of Entrepreneurial Ideas To The Status Of A Visionary Activity. Though Forced To Justify Their Efforts In The Pragmatic Language Of Venture Capital, They Were At Heart Utopian Thinkers Intent On Transforming The World.

Forcing People To Eat Together Is An Effective Way To Promote Tolerance.

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.

One Of The Unexpectedly Important Things That Art Can Do For Us Is To Teach Us How To Suffer More Successfully.

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

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.

Company We Keep

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.

A Dominant Impulse On Encountering Beauty Is To Wish To Hold On To It, To Possess It And Give It Weight In One’s Life. There Is An Urge To Say, ‘i Was Here, I Saw This And It Mattered To Me.

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

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.

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

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

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.

The Largest Part Of What We Call 'personality' Is Determined By How We've Opted To Defend Ourselves Against Anxiety And Sadness".

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.

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.

Cynics Are - Beneath It All - Only Idealists With Awkwardly High Standards.

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.

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.

Endeavoring To Purchase Something We Think Beautiful May In Fact Be The Most Unimaginative Way Of Dealing With The Longing It Excites In Us, Just As Trying To Sleep With Someone May Be The Bluntest Response To A Feeling Of Love.

To Cut Out Every Negative Root Would Simultaneously Mean Choking Off Positive Elements That Might Arise From It Further Up The Stem Of The Plant. We Should Not Feel Embarrassed By Our Difficulties, Only By Our Failure To Grow Anything Beautiful From Them.

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

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

Much Of The Really Serious Trouble In The World Gets Going With A Sense Of Humiliation.

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.

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.

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

Alcohol-inspired Fights Are A Reminder Of The Price We Pay For Our Daily Submission At The Altars Of Prudence And Order.

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

If One Felt Successful, There'd Be So Little Incentive To Be Successful.

To Be Shown Love Is To Feel Ourselves The Object Of Concern: Our Presence Is Noted, Our Name Is Registered, Our Views Are Listened To, Our Failings Are Treated With Indulgence And Our Needs Are Ministered To. And Under Such Care, We Flourish.

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.

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

Perhaps Because The Origins Of A Certain Kind Of Love Lie In An Impulse To Escape Ourselves And Out Weaknesses By An Alliance With The Beautiful And Noble. But If The Loved Ones Love Us Back, We Are Forced To Return To Ourselves, And Are Hence Reminded Of The Things That Had Driven Us Into Love In The First Place. Perhaps It Was Not Love We Wanted After All, Perhaps It Was Simply Someone In Whom To Believe, But How Can We Continue To Believe The The Beloved Now That They Believe In Us?

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.

A Great Writer Picks Up On Those Things That Matter. It’s Almost Like Their Radar Is Attuned To The Most Significant Moments.

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

It Is This Idea 'decency' Should Be Attached To Wealth -and 'indecency'' To Poverty - That Forms The Core Of One Strand Of Skeptical Complaint Against The Modern Status-ideal. Why Should Failure To Make Money Be Taken As A Sign Of An Unconditionally Flawed Human Being Rather Than Of A Fiasco In One Particular Area If The Far Larger, More Multifaceted, Project Of Leading A Good Life? Why Should Both Wealth And Poverty Be Read As The Predominant Guides To An Individual's Morals ?

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.

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

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.

Most Of Us Stand Poised At The Edge Of Brilliance, Haunted By The Knowledge Of Our Proximity, Yet Still Demonstrably On The Wrong Side Of The Line, Our Dealings With Reality Undermined By A Range Of Minor Yet Critical Psychological Flaws (a Little Too Much Optimism, An Unprocessed Rebelliousness, A Fatal Impatience Or Sentimentality). We Are Like An Exquisite High-speed Aircraft Which For Lack Of A Tiny Part Is Left Stranded Beside The Runway, Rendered Slower Than A Tractor Or Bicycle.

I Went To Church And Couldn't Swallow It. The Music Was Nice But I Don't Belong There.

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

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.'

No One Is Able To Produce A Great Work Of Art Without Experience, Nor Achieve A Worldly Position Immediately, Nor Be A Great Lover At The First Attempt; And In The Interval Between Initial Failure And Subsequent Success, 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 Suffer Because We Cannot Spontaneously Master The Ingredients Of Fulfillment.

We Accept The Need To Train Extensively To Fly A Plane; But Think Instinct Should Be Enough For Marrying And Raising Kids.

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

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

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

Blind Impatience Is Equally Evident In The Fruit Section. Our Ancestors Might Have Delighted In The Occasional Handful Of Berries Found On The Underside Of A Bush In Late Summer, Viewing It As A Sign Of The Unexpected Munificence Of A Divine Creator, But We Became Modern When We Gave Up On Awaiting Sporadic Gifts From Above And Sought To Render Any Pleasing Sensation Immediately And Repeatedly Available.

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.

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

Taking Architecture Seriously Therefore Makes Some Singular And Strenuous Demands Upon Us...it Means Conceding That We Are Inconveniently Vulnerable To The Colour Of Our Wallpaper And That Our Sense Of Purpose May Be Derailed By An Unfortunate Bedspread

To One's Enemies: "i Hate Myself More Than You Ever Could.

Arguments Are Like Eels: However Logical, They May Slip From The Minds Weak Grasp Unless Fixed There By Imagery And Style.

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

I Was Foreign And Jewish, With A Funny Name, And Was Very Small And Hated Sport, A Real Problem At An English Prep School. So The Way To Get Round It Was To Become The School Joker, Which I Did Quite Effectively - I Was Always Fooling Around To Make The People Who Would Otherwise Dump Me In The Loo Laugh.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Passionately Believe That's It's Not Just What You Say That Counts, It's Also How You Say It - That The Success Of Your Argument Critically Depends On Your Manner Of Presenting It.

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

Most Of What Makes A Book 'good' Is That We Are Reading It At The Right Moment For Us.

People Who Readily Accept The Need For A Gym Will Resist That Their Personalities Might Need Some Work Too.

Happiness May Be Difficult To Obtain. The Obstacles Are Not Primarily Financial.

Rather Than Getting More Spoilt With Age, As Difficulties Pile Up, Epiphanies Of Gratitude Abound.

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

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

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

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!

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?

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

Not Everyone Is Worth Listening To.

I Think People Want To Get Married To End Their Emotional Uncertainty. In A Way, They Want To End Powerful Feelings, Or Certainly The Negative Ones.

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.

The More Closely We Analyze What We Consider 'sexy,' The More Clearly We Will Understand That Eroticism Is The Feeling Of Excitement We Experience At Finding Another Human Being Who Shares Our Values And Our Sense Of The Meaning Of Existence.

Our Jobs Make Relentless Calls On A Narrow Band Of Our Faculties, Reducing Our Chances Of Achieving Rounded Personalities And Leaving Us To Suspect (often In The Gathering Darkness Of A Sunday Evening) That Much Of Who We Are, Or Could Be, Has Gone Unexplored.

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.

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.

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 Nothing Here Is Normal, That The Streets Are Different In Wisebaden, And Louyang, That This Is Just One Of Many Possible Worlds.

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

There Is No Such Thing As Work-life Balance. Everything Worth Fighting For Unbalances Your Life.

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.

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

We Used To Build Temples, And Museums Are About As Close As Secular Society Dares To Go In Facing Up To The Idea That A Good Building Can Change Your Life (and A Bad One Ruin It).

Secular Society

Envy: A Confused, Tangled Guide To One's Own Ambitions.

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.

It Is No Coincidence That The Western Attraction To Sublime Landscapes Developed At Precisely The Moment When Traditional Beliefs In God Began To Wane.

That Said, Deciding To Avoid Other People Does Not Necessarily Equate With Having No Desire Whatsoever For Company; It May Simply Reflect A Dissatisfaction With What—or Who—is Available. Cynics Are, In The End, Only Idealists With Awkwardly High Standards. In Chamfort's Words, 'it Is Sometimes Said Of A Man Who Lives Alone That He Does Not Like Society. This Is Like Saying Of A Man That He Does Not Like Going For Walks Because He Is Not Fond Of Walking At Night In The Forêt De Bondy.

What Is A Snob? A Snob Is Anybody Who Takes A Small Part Of You And Uses That To Come To A Complete Vision Of Who You Are. That Is Snobbery.

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

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

Our Greatest Furies Spring From Events Which Violate Our Sense Of The Ground Of Our Existence.

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 More Dignity Is Widely And Freely Available In A Society, The Less People Want To Be Famous.

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.

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

Though It May Feel Otherwise, Enjoying Life Is No More Dangerous Than Apprehending It With Continuous Anxiety And Gloom.

I Thought About Societies Where Exceptional Fortunes Are Built Up In Industries With Very Little Connection To Out Sincere And Significant Needs, Industries Where It Is Difficult To Escape From The Disparity Between A Seriousness Of Means And A Triviality Of Ends.

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.

Year-end Financial Statements Express A Truth About Office Life Which Is No Less Irrefutable Yet Also, In The End, No Less Irrelevant Or Irritating Than An Evolutionary Biologist's Proud Reminder That The Purpose Of Existence Lies In The Propagation Of Our Genes.

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

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

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.

One Of The Better Guarantors Of Ending Up In A Good Relationship: An Advanced Capacity To Be Alone.

Good Relationship

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

Good Sex Isn't Just Fun, It Keeps Us Sane And Happy. Having Sex With Someone Makes Us Feel Wanted, Alive And Potent.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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 The Same Process Of Simplification Or Selection As In The Imagination.

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

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

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.

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

Choosing A Spouse And A Choosing Career: The Two Great Decisions For Which Society Refuses To Set Up Institutional Guidance.

The Secular World Is Full Of Holes. We Have Secularized Badly.

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.

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.

We Envy Only Those Whom We Feel Ourselves To Be Like; We Envy Only Members Of Our Reference Group. There Are Few Successes More Unendurable Than Those Of Our Close Friends.

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 Should Worry Us Is Not The Number Of People That Oppose Us, But How Good Their Reasons Are For Doing So.

The Only Possible Way To Begin A Book Is To Tell Oneself That Its Eventual Failure Is Guaranteed — But Survivable.

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

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.

I Know A Lot About Writing, But I Don't Know Much About How Other Industries Work. I've Tried To Use My Naivety To My Advantage.

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

True Respectability Stems Not From The Will Of The Majority But From Proper Reasoning.

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.

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.

It Is Perhaps When Our Lives Are At Their Most Problematic That We Are Likely To Be Most Receptive To Beautiful Things.

Beautiful Things

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

Never, Ever Become A Writer. It's A Nightmare.

Forgiveness Requires A Sense That Bad Behaviour Is A Sign Of Suffering Rather Than Malice.

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.

A Successful Work Will Draw Out The Features Capable Of Exciting A Sense Of Beauty And Interest In The Spectator.

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.

The Challenge Of Modern Relationships: How To Prove More Interesting Than The Other's Smartphone.

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

.. If You Asked Most People Whether They Believed In Love Or Not, They’d Probably Say They Didn’t. Yet That’s Not Necessarily What They Truly Think. It’s Just The Way They Defend Themselves Against What They Want. They Believe In It, But Pretend They Don’t Until They’re Allowed To. Most People Would Throw Away All Their Cynicism If They Could. The Majority Just Never Gets The Chance.

We Tend To Believe In The Modern Secular World That If You Tell Someone Something Once, They'll Remember It. ... Religions Go, "nonsense. You Need To Keep Repeating The Lesson 10 Times A Day. So Get On Your Knees And Repeat It." That's What All Religions Tell Us: "get On Your Knees And Repeat It 10 Or 20 Or 15 Times A Day." Otherwise Our Minds Are Like Sieves.

In The Works Of Lucretius, We Find Two Reasons Why We Shouldn't Worry About Death. If You Have Had A Successful Life, Lucretius Tell Us, There's No Reason To Mind Its End. And, If You Haven't Had A Good Time, "why Do You Seek To Add More Years, Which Would Also Pass But Ill?"

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.

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

The Price We Have Paid For Expecting To Be So Much More Than Our Ancestors Is A Perpetual Anxiety That We Are Far From Being All We Might Be.

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

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

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.

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.

Our Homes Do Not Have To Offer Us Permanent Occupancy Or Store Our Clothes To Merit The Name. To Speak Of Home In Relation To A Building Is Simply To Recognise Its Harmony With Our Own Prized Internal Song. Home Can Be An Airport Or A Library, A Garden Or A Motorway Diner.

We Are Sad At Home And Blame The Weather And The Ugliness Of The Buildings, But On The Tropical Island We Learn That The State Of The Skies And The Appearance Of Our Dwellings Can Never On Their Own Underwrite Our Joy Nor Condemn Us To Misery.

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

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

Literature Deserves Its Prestige For One Reason Above All Others - Because It's A Tool To Help Us Live And Die With A Little Bit More Wisdom, Goodness, And Sanity.

The Pre-scientific Age, Whatever Its Deficiencies, Had At Least Offered Its Members The Peace Of Mind That Follows From Knowing All Man-made Achievements To Be Nothing Next To The Grandeur Of The Universe. We, More Blessed In Our Gadgetry But Less Humble In Our Outlook, Have Been Left... Having No More Compelling Repository Of Veneration Than Our Brilliant, Precise, Blinkered And Morally Troubling Fellow Human Beings.

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

[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 Blind Us To The Fact That They Are Really, Despite A Thousand Differences, Just Altered Versions Of Ourselves: Fellow Fragile, Uncertain, Flawed Beings Likewise Craving Love And In Urgent Need Of Forgiveness.

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.

Out Of The Millions Of People We Live Among, Most Of Whom We Habitually Ignore And Are Ignored By In Turn, There Are Always A Few That Hold Hostage Our Capacity For Happiness, Whom We Could Recognize By Their Smell Alone And Whom We Would Rather Die Than Be Without.

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.

Maturity: Knowing Where You're Crazy, Trying To Warn Others Of The Fact And Striving To Keep Yourself Under Control.

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.

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.

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

For Paranoia About 'what Other People Think' : Remember That Only Some Hate, A Very Few Love - And Almost All Just Don't Care.

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 A Relationship, Perhaps Raise Some Children, Watch The Onset Of Mortality In Your Parents' Generation And Eventually In Your Own, Until One Day A Fatal Illness Starts Gnawing At Your Innards And You Calmly Go To The Grave, Shut The Coffin And Are Done With The Self-evident Business Of Life.

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Dominic Chianese

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