Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
I do think that travel can be part of a journey of inner maturation, but you've got to do it right.
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Many people in the intellectual elite are very scared of shouting. They insist on very quiet murmurs.
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
I was told by my father nine times a day that you were going to get a job the minute you finish your studies.
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.