“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.”

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.

There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

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

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.

To the best of my knowledge, every acute inpatient ward offers some inpatient group therapy experience.

…all the most acute, most powerful, and most deadly diseases, and those which are most difficult to be understood by the inexperienced, fall upon the brain.

The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.

We’re highly social animals – I’m told by scientists that what makes us different from other animals is an acute social awareness, which is what has made us so successful.

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.

What everyone underestimated was the acute unpopularity of the Taliban, even in the Pashtun areas.

As the antagonism between those who possess, and those who do not, is becoming more acute day after day.