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

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

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

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.

Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.

I like the connection with fans and people who have been supportive of me. And I love the idea of real feedback and a two-way street, which is very, very modern.

The modern woman asks herself: Is there something wrong with me if my children don’t fill up my life?

Devout Christians are destined to be regarded as fools in modern society. We are fools for Christ’s sake. We must pray for courage to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world.

Modern dance isn’t anything except one thing in my mind: the freedom of women in America.

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

So much of modern politics is focused not on honest differences of policy but on personal attacks.

The more country that my music gets, the less it fits into the country world today. It’s almost like there needs to be two genres, modern country and country?

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.