We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole...
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Life gives us no such handy markers – a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.