“Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.”

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

One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.

When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.

Irrespective of doubts and convictions, and for the Infinite Love I bear for one and all, I continue to come as the Avatar, to be judged time and again by humanity in its ignorance, in order to help man distinguish the Real from the false.

The heart is long, very long in receiving the convictions that is forced upon it by reason… affection still lingers in the Bosom, even after esteem has taken its flight.

Somewhere in my head, a private conviction exists that ‘Search is the Process’ and ‘Discovery the Art Form.

And this has nothing to do with conviction and with religious beliefs, because those are immutable. But we need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and which will remove some of the misconceptions

Let our lives be in accordiance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles

… my convictions led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth as authority, rather than ‘taking authority for truth.’

The gospel will persuade no one unless it has so convicted us that we are transformed by it.

Being a sex symbol was rather like being a convict.