The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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 of its component parts and particularities.
Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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 are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.