“beauty is something to be found rather than passively encountered, it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea... Chardin opens our eyes to the beauty of salt cellars, Elstir paints nothing grander than cotton dresses and harbors”

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“because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the insanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. By contrast, a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments”

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“everything is potentially a fertile subject for art and we can make discoveries as valuable in an advertisement for soap as in Pascal's Pensées... the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.”

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“However brilliant, however wise the work, it seems that the lives of artists can be relied upon to exhibit an extraordinary, incongruous range of turmoil, misery, and stupidity.”

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“However, only too frequently, suffering fails to alchemize into ideas, and instead of affording us a better sense of reality pushes us into a baneful direction... by engaging a variety of defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.”

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“Only when plunged into grief do we have the Proustian incentive to confront difficult truths, as we wail under the bedclothes, like branches in the autumn wind.”

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“our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame”

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“Our notion of reality is at variance with actual reality because we are surrounded by clichéd depictions of the world”

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“Pascal was born in 1623, and was recognized from an early age to be a genius. By 12 he had worked out the first 32 propositions of Euclid; he went on to invent the mathematics of probability, he measured atmospheric pressure, constructed a calculating machine, designed an omnibus, got tuberculosis and wrote the brilliant and pessimistic series of aphorisms in defense of Christian belief know as the Pensées.”

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“the finest thing about betrayal and jealousy—it's ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.”

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“The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look... reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather tan the result of anything inherently deficient about them... a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.”

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“the level of insincerity apparently required in every friendship... a project to secure affection, and a project to express ourselves honestly... the pursuit of affection and the pursuit of truth are fundamentally rather than occasionally incompatible”

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“There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness… the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit… we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.”

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“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.”

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“We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context, it helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions and reconcile ourselves to its presence.”

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