Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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.
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.
Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.
Politicians want people to be nice neighbours, but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware.
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
Becoming a writer wasn't a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do); it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
At 'The School of Life', we take seriously anything that has to do with human fulfilment - and take note wherever insight on this subject can be found.
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.
In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you without you needing to speak.