A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Not everyone is worth listening to.
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not – as we flatteringly think – how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
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.