“What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.”

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.

The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

For when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

Experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their “pursuit of happiness” to outright obliterating it.

There’s a bunch of songs that I call B-sides on the record that you could argue could maybe have some potential commercial success with another artist, but for me, they just felt really whack.

It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

When proven wrong, the wise man will correct himself and the ignorant will keep arguing.