I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.
At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,’ he had reported, ‘after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface – one doesn’t have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it!
The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.
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. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don’t work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The.
Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?
Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.
Every fall into love is the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.
We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.
I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.
When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us.
To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to ‘put’ it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.
Because I have this thing about birthdays – they always remind me of death and forced jollity.
A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.
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 ardur and paradoxes – than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival.
It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.