“The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

The Brady ‘Campaign Against Illegal Guns’ is yet another crusade whose ultimate goal is to trample the Second Amendment into dust.

There’s a very simple reason for focusing on the nuclear issue. Many, many issues are of supreme importance in one way or another, but if we blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons, no other issue is really going to matter.

I don’t know where hell is … another dimension, perhaps, or another plane of reality.

The disciples had arguments with Jesus! It is about listening to one another, and respecting one another with those differences.

In the last two years, the Mexicans have detained nearly 400,000 migrants whose intent was to come to the United States.

One that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

Men do not greet one another like this … except perhaps at rugby club dinners.

It is not hard to feel like an outsider. I think we have all felt like that at one time or another.