He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disparagement.
Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas – foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.
We are about to understand, but have not yet understood. This moment is important because it generally does not lie up to its promise. We abandon the process of reflection. Not much of a decision about the personal meaning of love, justice or success is achieved, and we move on to something else. Looking at Twombly’s painting assists us in a crucial thought: ‘The part of me that wonders about important questions and then gets confused has not had enough recognition.
Beneath many erotic triggers lie symbolic solutions to some of our greatest fears, and poignant allusions to our yearnings for friendship and understanding.
The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment... Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on the failure. There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.
There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.
What matters is not what we seem to a random group, but what we know we are. In Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Every reproach can hurt only to the extent that it hits the mark. Whoever actually knows that he does not deserve a reproach can and will confidently treat it with contempt.
The success of any relationship should be determined, not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.
If drawing had value even when practiced by those with no talent, it was, Ruskin believed, because it could teach us to see – that is, to notice rather than to merely look. In the process of re-creating with our own hands what lies before our eyes, we seem naturally to evolve from observing beauty in a loose way to possessing a deep understanding of its constituent parts and hence more secure memories of it.
De ironie van de liefde wil dat we het gemakkelijkst en met de meeste zelfverzekerdheid de mensen verleiden tot wie we ons het minst aangetrokken voelen, aangezien we bij een intens verlangen niet in staat zijn de daarvoor vereiste onverschilligheid op te brengen en bij een aantrekkelijk iemand worden geplaagd door een gevoel van minderwaardigheid ten opzichte van de perfectie die we de aanbedene toedichten.
It is the news that introduces us to a far wider range of human beings than we could ever meet in person, and that over time, through the stories it runs and the way it comments on them, forms an idea in our minds about the kind of country we live in.
Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained.
Let’s make sure our ideas of success are our own, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions.
If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.
Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.
His clumsiness is at least an incidental sign of his sincerity: we tend not to get very anxious when seducing people we don’t much care about.
Human beings sometimes interest me but I don’t like them because they are not intelligent enough.