Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: ‘Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
We wanted to test each other’s capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
Let’s say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, ‘I’ve come here because I’m in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,’ – they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed – but survivable.