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..

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 ….

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next..

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement..

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time..

The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones..

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 thos….

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator..

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are..

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe..

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….

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 forge….

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts..

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….

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be..

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 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 thro….

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us..

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy..

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 a….

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 w….