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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.

-Alain De Botton

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Journeys Are The Midwives

Alain De Botton

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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.

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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.

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Company We Keep

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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?

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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.

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Falling In Love

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.

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Company We Keep

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Beautiful Things

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.

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

There Is Always The Option Of Being Emotionally Lazy, That Is, Of Quoting.

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

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.

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.

When Work Is Not Going Well, It's Useful To Remember That Our Identities Stretch Beyond What Is On The Business Card, That We Were People Long Before We Became Workers - And Will Continue To Be Human Once We Have Put Our Tools Down Forever.

The Greatest Difficulty Of Travel Is That One Is Forced To Take Oneself Along.

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

There's A Whole Category Of People Who Miss Out By Not Allowing Themselves To Be Weird Enough.

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 Would Scarcely Be Acceptable, For Example, To Ask In The Course Of An Ordinary Conversation What Our Society Holds To Be The Purpose Of Work.

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

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

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.

As We Write, So We Build: To Keep A Record Of What Matters To Us.

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.

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

The Only People We Can Think Of As Normal Are Those We Don't Yet Know Very Well.

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

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.

Art Holds Out The Promise Of Inner Wholeness.

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.

Responsible For Wrapping The Iron Fist Of Authority In Its Velvet Glove Is Jane Axtell, Head Of The Accountancy Firm's Human Resources Department.

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

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

The Greatest Works Of Art Speak To Us Without Knowing Us.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

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.

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

Significant Things

The Desire For High Status Is Never Stronger Than In Situations Where "ordinary" Life Fails To Answer A Median Need For Dignity And Comfort.

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

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

Not Everyone Is Worth Listening To.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Newspapers Are Being Read All Around. The Point Is Not, Of Course, To Glean New Information, But Rather To Coax The Mind Out Of Its Sleep-induced Introspective Temper.

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.

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

We Should Not Feel Embarrassed By Our Difficulties, Only By Our Failure To Grow Anything Beautiful From Them.

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

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

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.

There Is A Longing For A Return To A Time Without The Need For Choices, Free Of The Regret At The Inevitable Loss That All Choice (however Wonderful) Has Entailed.

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

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.

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

We Should Not Be Frightened By Appearances.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

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