“We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

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.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It’s a melodrama.

But anything that you hear about Japan is nothing like what you see when you actually go over there and see it, you know, in a real situation.

There’s one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.

Health is the most critical thing in our life. With your health anything is possible, without it you can’t do anything.

I love the four-day weekend without having anything that particularly has to get done. And of course, I love the fundamental idea behind it-giving thanks for all the good people and good things in your life.

I find it really hard to say anything coherent or interesting about the work I do.

I can act. I’ve been acting for a long time, but like anything else, don’t nobody owe you nothing. You’ve go to pay your dues. You go from A to Z; you don’t go from M to Z.