“One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.”

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.

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.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

At the end of every hard day, people find some reason to believe.

If all the girls attending [the Yale prom] were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with Me, to give every man according as his work shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

Play the picture in your mind – focus on the end result.

Your separation from God is the hardest work you will ever do.

We could fight the fuss till we get like friends, Or somebody bite the dust and we split like ends. Even in our wildest moments, girl, I’m on it cause you’re worth it. Practice makes perfect, so we fightin’ for a purpose.

Indeed one of the ultimate advantages of an education is simply coming to the end of it.

A lot of the stuff that my father told me not to do, I did it anyway and I ended up learning the hard way.