“Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.”

You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.

How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?

Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after “Like A Rolling Stone”.

That went for the writers, too; they all had their own political leanings, and everybody had a voice. But the voices were mostly critical. It was social commentary, after all.

I think there are all kinds of different hells. It’s not a place you go to after you die.

Seemed merely a temporary halt on my steady descent through layer after layer of depression, like an elevator stopping for a moment on the way down to the basement.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

Hey, Hachi People always say that you only discover how precious something is after you lose it— but I think, you only really recognize it… when you see it a second time face to face. -Nana Osaki

The embassy was active here after the revolution. We didn’t have any problem with them. They started it.

After all, our families–our ancestors–are our identities. Biology is destiny.