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….

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not ….

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity..

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 ….

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..

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all..

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….

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is re….

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequis….

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to ackno….

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy..

Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day..

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….

Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them..

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice..

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand..

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children..

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did..

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do..

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones..

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 t….