The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.