“The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”

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.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood?

We’re talking about a world where the PC is no longer the center, but just a devicewhere your new devices need to be more portable, more personal.

The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

A feeling of violation swayed inside me, making me feel as if id been shoved off a high platform without warning. I was falling, and i feared the sensation far more than hitting bottom. There was no end; just a constantsense of gravity having its way with me.

We need to remember that we are saved by grace when we fail. But we need to remember it much more when we succeed.

One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.