There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.
To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.
French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne.
At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.
In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.
A thought provoking number of the world’s most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.
If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.
I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.
Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break – a day away, a busy period, an evening at work – for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.
Wat hield deze liefdespermanentie in? Een zeker geloof in de liefde van de ander, dat zonder onmiddellijk bewijs of teken van de belangstelling van de geliefde in stand kon blijven, het geloof dat de partner, hoewel voor het weekend in Milaan of Wenen, niet bezig was een cappuccino of Sachertorte te nuttigen met een liefdesrivaal, het geloof dat een stilte gewoon een stilte was en niet een aanwijzing dat de liefde ter ziele was.
We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations.
The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
There is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
My dear friend, I may be dense,’ replied Humblot after having taken a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, ’but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.
How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.
One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed.
We want our buildings to speak to us of whatever we find important and need to be reminded of.
Though we can of course use our minds without being in pain, Proust’s suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence.
We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.