The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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 information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
We wanted to test each other’s capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.