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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.

-Alain De Botton

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Our Minds Are Susceptible

Alain De Botton

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

According To Montaigne, It Was The Oppressive Notion That We Had Complete Mental Control Over Our Bodies, And The Horror Of Departing From This Portrait Of Normality, That Had Left The Man Unable To Perform Sexually.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Love And Friendship

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

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

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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 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

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.

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

We 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.

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.

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It Is By Finding Out What Something Is Not That One Comes Closest To Understanding What It Is.

We Should Not Be Frightened By Appearances.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Art Holds Out The Promise Of Inner Wholeness.

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.

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?

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

Falling In Love

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Intuition Is Unconscious Accumulated Experience Informing Judgement In Real Time.

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

We 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.

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.

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

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 ?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Beautiful Things

Most Good Thinking Has Its Origin In Fear.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Our Sense Of What Is Valuable Will Hence Be Radically Distorted If We Must Perpetually Condemn As Tedious Everything We Lack, Simply Because We Lack It.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Relationship

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

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

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.

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 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.

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 Are Tempted To Believe That Certain Achievements And Possessions Will Give Us Enduring Satisfaction. We Are Invited To Imagine Ourselves Scaling The Steep Cliff Face Of Happiness In Order To Reach A Wide, High Plateau On Which We Will Live Out The Rest Of Our Lives; We Are Not Reminded That Soon After Gaining The Summit, We Will Be Called Down Again Into Fresh Lowlands Of Anxiety And Desire.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

There Is Psychological Pleasure In This Takeoff, Too, For The Swiftness Of The Plane’s Ascent Is An Exemplary Symbol Of Transformation. The Display Of Power Can Inspire Us To Imagine Analogous, Decisive Shifts In Our Own Lives, To Imagine That We, Too, Might One Day Surge Above Much That Now Looms Over Us.” P. 38-39

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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