Quotes
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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.
Status Anxiety
Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping, and the Novel
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
The Art of Travel
Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.
Status Anxiety
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays
Essays