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 a….

Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating t….

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new informatio….

For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort o….

A good half of the art of living is resilience..

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it….

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to inst….

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

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might prev….

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol..

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….

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them..

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

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards..

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?.

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our….

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone..

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with..

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could..

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible..

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 ar….