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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.

-Alain De Botton

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Our Capacity To Draw

Alain De Botton

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We Should Not Be Frightened By Appearances.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What Is Fascinating About Marriage Is Why Anyone Wants To Get Married.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

As An Atheist, I Think There Are Lots Of Things Religions Get Up To Which Are Of Value To Non-believers - And One Of Those Things Is Trying To Be A Bit Better Than We Normally Manage To Be.

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

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

Not Everyone Is Worth Listening To.

If Cynicism And Love Lie At Opposite Ends Of A Spectrum, Do We Not Sometimes Fall In Love In Order To Escape The Debilitating Cynicism To Which We Are Prone? Is There Not In Every Coup De Foudre A Certain Willful Exaggeration Of The Qualities Of The Beloved, An Exaggeration Which Distracts Us From Our Habitual Pessimism And Focuses Our Energies On Someone In Whom We Can Believe In A Way We Have Never Believed In Ourselves?

Falling In Love

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

We Often Lose Our Tempers Not With Those Who Are Actually To Blame; Just With Those Who Love Us Enough To Forgive Us Our Foul Moods.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Significant Things

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

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

One Rarely Falls In Love Without Being As Much Attracted To What Is Interestingly Wrong With Someone As What Is Objectively Healthy.

Falling In Love

We Depend On Our Surroundings Obliquely To Embody The Moods And Ideas We Respect And Then To Remind Us Of Them. We Look To Our Buildings To Hold Us, Like A Kind Of Psychological Mould, To A Helpful Vision Of Ourselves. We Arrange Around Us Material Forms Which Communicate To Us What We Need — But Are At Constant Risk Of Forgetting What We Need — Within. We Turn To Wallpaper, Benches, Paintings And Streets To Staunch The Disappearance Of Our True Selves.

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

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

Love And Friendship

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.

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.

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.

It Is Not Necessarily At Home That We Best Encounter Our True Selves. The Furniture Insists That We Cannot Change Because It Does Not; The Domestic Setting Keeps Us Tethered To The Person We Are In Ordinary Life, Who May Not Be Who We Essentially Are.

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

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

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Good Relationship

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Journeys Are The Midwives Of Thought. Few Places Are More Conducive To Internal Conversations Than Moving Planes, Ships Or Trains.

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

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

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

We Don't Exist Unless There Is Someone Who Can See Us Existing, What We Say Has No Meaning Until Someone Can Understand, While To Be Surrounded By Friends Is Constantly To Have Our Identity Confirmed; Their Knowledge And Care For Us Have The Power To Pull Us From Our Numbness. In Small Comments, Many Of Them Teasing, They Reveal They Know Our Foibles And Except Them And So, In Turn, Accept That We Have A Place In The World.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Bad Architecture Is In The End As Much A Failure Of Psychology As Of Design. It Is An Example Expressed Through Materials Of The Same Tendencies Which In Other Domains Will Lead Us To Marry The Wrong People, Choose Inappropriate Jobs And Book Unsuccessful Holidays: The Tendency Not To Understand Who We Are And What Will Satisfy Us.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 ?

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

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.

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

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.

To Design Means Forcing Ourselves To Unlearn What We Believe We Already Know, Patiently To Take Apart The Mechanisms Behind Our Reflexes And To Acknowledge The Mystery And Stupefying Complexity Of Everyday Gestures Like Switching Off A Light Of Turning On A Tap

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.

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Philip Massinger

Louisa May Alcott

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