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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.

-Alain De Botton

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One Of Our Major

Alain De Botton

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

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.

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

Good Books Put A Finger On Emotions That Are Deeply Our Own - But That We Could Never Have Described On Our Own.

Feeling Lost, Crazy And Desperate Belongs To A Good Life As Much As Optimism, Certainty And Reason.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Architects Who Benefit Us Most Maybe Those Generous Enough To Lay Aside Their Claims To Genius In Order To Devote Themselves To Assembling Graceful But Predominantly Unoriginal Boxes. Architecture Should Have The Confidence And The Kindness To Be A Little Boring.

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

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

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

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

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.

It Seems The Only Way To Write A Half Decent Book Is To Worry Oneself Sick On An Hourly Basis That One Is Producing A Complete Disaster.

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 Bourgeois Thinkers Of The Eighteenth Century Thus Turned Aristotle's Formula On Its Head: Satisfactions Which The Greek Philosopher Had Identified With Leisure Were Now Transposed To The Sphere Of Work, While Tasks Lacking In Any Financial Reward Were Drained Of All Significance And Left To The Haphazard Attentions Of Decadent Dilettantes. It Now Seemed As Impossible That One Could Be Happy And Unproductive As It Had Once Seemed Unlikely That One Could Work And Be Human.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Status Anxiety Definitely Exists At A Political Level. Many Iraqis Were Annoyed With The Us Essentially For Reasons Of Status: For Not Showing Them Respect, For Humiliating Them.

Distress At Losing An Object Can Be As Much A Frustration At The Intellectual Mystery Of The Disappearance As About The Loss Itself.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Activities Of Drawing, Eating And Drinking, All Involve Assimilations By The Self Of Desirable Elements From The World, A Transfer Of Goodness From Without To Within.

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

Beautiful Things

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.

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

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

Most Victories Are, In The Best Way, Acts Of Revenge.

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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Secular Society

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's Very Hard To Respect People On Holiday - Everybody Looks So Silly At The Beach, It Makes You Hate Humanity - But When You See People At Their Work They Elicit Respect, Whether It's A Mechanic, A Stonemason Or An Accountant.

When You Look At The Moon, You Think, ‘i’m Really Small. What Are My Problems?’ It Sets Things Into Perspective. We Should All Look At The Moon A Bit More Often.

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.

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

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.

It Is Not Just Nature That Defies Us. Human Life Is As Overwhelming... If We Spend Time In It [the Vast Spaces Of Nature], They May Help Us To Accept More Graciously The Great, Unfathomable Events That Molest Our Lives And Will Inevitably Return Us To Dust.

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

We Each Appear To Hold Within Ourselves A Range Of Divergent Views As To Our Native Qualities.. And Amid Such Uncertainty, We Typically Turn To The Wider World To Settle The Question Of Our Significance.. We Seem Beholden To Affections Of Others To Endure Ourselves.

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.

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

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

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

Love And Friendship

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

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.

As Victims Of Hurt, We Frequently Don't Bring Up What Ails Us, Because So Many Wounds Look Absurd In The Light Of Day.

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

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.

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

Good Relationship

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

A 'good Job' Can Be Both Practically Attractive While Still Not Good Enough To Devote Your Entire Life To.

Not Good Enough

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

Mental Health: Having Enough Safe Places In Your Mind For Your Thoughts To Settle.

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.

How Generous Was It To Offer Gifts To People One Knew Would Never Accept Them?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

When Proust Urges Us To Evaluate The World Properly, He Repeatedly Reminds Us Of The Value Of Modest Scenes.

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.

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

A Simple Problem Of Arithmetic: There Are Far More Ambitions Than There Are Grand Destinies Available.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

We Should Not Be Frightened By Appearances.

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

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.

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

.. 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.

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.

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.

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

Symons Remarked That The Most Common And Unhelpful Illusion Plaguing Those Who Came To See Him Was The Idea That They Ought Somehow, In The Normal Course Of Events, To Have Intuited Long Before They Had Finished Their Degrees, Started Families, Bought Houses And Risen To The Top Of Law Firms - What They Should Properly Be Doing With Their Lives. They Were Tormented By A Residual Notion Of Having Through Some Error Or Stupidity On Their Part Missed Out On Their True Calling.

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

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

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 Arrogance That Says Analysing The Relationship Between Reasons And Causes Is More Important Than Writing A Philosophy Of Shyness Or Sadness Or Friendship Drives Me Nuts. I Can't Accept That.

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

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.

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

Work Is Most Fulfilling When You're At The Comfortable, Exciting Edge Of Not Quite Knowing What You Are Doing.

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.'

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.

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 Was No Longer Her Absence That Wounded Me, But My Growing Indifference To It. Forgetting, However Calming, Was Also A Reminder Of Infidelity To What I Had At One Time Held So Dear.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Booksellers Are The Most Valuable Destination For The Lonely, Given The Numbers Of Books That Were Written Because Authors Couldn't Find Anyone To Talk To.

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.

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

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

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

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