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….

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage o….

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?.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope..

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad..

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered..

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it..

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us..

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts..

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us..

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be..

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person..

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too..

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display o….

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting..

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 fr….

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves..

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint agains….

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..

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves..

Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of ….