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<< Prev Next >>The Artistic Imagination (9)
A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, ...
The Art of Travel
The Art of Travel
Looking at Our Screens (10)
It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thin...
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
The Feeling of the Sublime (11)
For thousands of years, it had been nature - and its supposed creator - that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense ...
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Anxiety Awareness (12)
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another - which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil a...
Status Anxiety
Status Anxiety
Looking at Others in the Wrong Way (13)
The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion a...
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Somebody and Nobody (14)
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies" - both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, ...
Status Anxiety
Status Anxiety
A Meaningful Job (15)
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act me...
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Desperate Need for Love (16)
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 hallucina...
On Love
On Love
A Helpful Vision of Ourselves (17)
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful v...
The Architecture of Happiness
The Architecture of Happiness
Cynicism and Love (18)
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a ce...
On Love
On Love
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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