Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar..

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness"..

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or fr….

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 o….

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….

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 attem….

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

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 p….

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

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort..

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

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public..

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is..

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

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 ….

Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial..

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..

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

There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it..

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

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 sob….