“Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way—towards a busy street or terminal—before they run out of their burrows.”

more info

“Developing an adequate response to rejection, neither defensive nor sentimental, lies at the heart of any serious attempt at sanity.”

more info

“The only childhood truly deserving of the title ‘privileged’ is one which imbues someone with a capacity to be a friend to themselves.”

more info

“Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.”

more info

“The continue to deny the significance of barely perceptible childhood abuses was to manifest the same robust and foolhardy common sense which had once led our ancestors to scoff at the notion that there might be deadly colonies of microorganisms thriving in drops of saliva no larger than pinheads.”

more info

“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.”

more info

“Abstractly cheering thought: the millions of people around the world who will tonight sleep together for the first time.”

more info

“On architecture: even if we lived in Venice or a Louis Kahn house, we would still often be in a bad mood.”

more info

“…it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.”

more info

“Schopenhauer: the task of philosophy is to turn tears into knowledge. And for me, a sigh into a tweet.”

more info

“When it finally briefly happens, happiness can feel very worrying.”

more info

“Most great problems have no solutions, beyond the relief to be had in sharing and analysing them.”

more info

“What grief we’d avoid if we knew how to transfer emotional experience across generations, as we do money or scientific knowledge.”

more info

“It takes a particular lack of imagination to feel no discomfort in the presence of a cleaner.”

more info

“There are meetings which, when cancelled at the last minute, give one an ecstatic feeling of having cheated death for a little longer.”

more info