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The Longing For A Destiny Is No Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life. All Too Often Forced To Share Our Bed With Those Who Cannot Fathom Our Soul, Can We Not Be Forgiven If We Believe Ourselves Fated To Stumble One Day Upon The Man Or Woman Of Our Dreams.

-Alain De Botton

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The Longing For A

Alain De Botton

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The Longing For A Destiny Is No Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life. All Too Often Forced To Share Our Bed With Those Who Cannot Fathom Our Soul, Can We Not Be Forgiven If We Believe Ourselves Fated To Stumble One Day Upon The Man Or Woman Of Our Dreams.

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

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.

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

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.

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

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

It 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Good Relationship

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

If Optimism Is Important, It's Because Many Outcomes Are Determined By How Much Of It We Bring To The Task. It Is An Important Ingredient Of Success. This Flies In The Face Of The Elite View That Talent Is The Primary Requirement Of A Good Life, But In Many Cases The Difference Between Success And Failure Is Determined By Nothing More Than Our Sense Of What Is Possible And The Energy We Can Muster To Convince Others Of Our Due. We Might Be Doomed Not By A Lack Of Skill, But By An Absence Of Hope!

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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 ?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Significant Things

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

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

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

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.

It Is Striking How Much More Seriously We Are Likely To Be Taken After We Have Been Dead A Few Centuries.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

We Should Not Be Frightened By Appearances.

.. 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 Feel Something, And Reach Out For The Nearest Phrase Or Hum With Which To Communicate, But Which Fails To Do Justice To What Has Induced Us To Do So....we Stay On The Outside Of Our Impressions, As If Staring At Them Through A Frosted Window, Superficially Related To Them, Yet Estranged From Whatever Has Eluded Casual Definition.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Art Cannot Single-handedly Create Enthusiasm... It Merely Contributes To Enthusiasm And Guides Us To Be More Conscious Of Feelings That We Might Previously Have Experienced Only Tentatively Or Hurriedly.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Every Time We Feel Satisfied With What We Have, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

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

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

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

I Am Conscious Of Trying To Stretch The Boundaries Of Non-fiction Writing. It's Always Surprised Me How Little Attention Many Non-fiction Writers Pay To The Formal Aspects Of Their Work.

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

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 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.

Sublime Places Repeat In Grand Terms A Lesson That Ordinary Life Typically Teaches Viciously: That The Universe Is Mightier Than We Are, That We Are Frail And Temporary And Have No Alternative But To Accept Limitations On Our Will; That We Must Bow To Necessities Greater Than Ourselves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Most Good Thinking Has Its Origin In Fear.

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.

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

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

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

Everyone Wants A Better Life: Very Few Of Us Want To Be Better People.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

In Britain, Because I Live Here, I Can Also Run Into Problems Of Envy And Competition. But All This Is Just In A Day's Work For A Writer. You Can't Put Stuff Out There Without Someone Calling You A Complete Fool. Oh, Well.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

One Of Love's Greatest Drawbacks Is That, For A While At Least, It Is In Danger Of Making Us Happy.

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

Love And Friendship

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.

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.

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.

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

We Don't Really Learn Anything Properly Until There Is A Problem, Until We Are In Pain, Until Something Fails To Go As We Had Hoped ... We Suffer, Therefore We Think.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Insomnia Is A Glamorous Term For Thoughts You Forgot To Have In The Day.

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George Bernard Shaw

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