22 Quotes by Jed Rubenfeld

The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning—the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life—a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

Unhappiness is caused when we cannot let go of our memories.

Disgust is so reassuring; it feels like a moral proof.

For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear.

A woman is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.

Satisfying a savage instinct is incomparably more pleasurable than satisfying a civilized one.

Mr Banwell had mastered the great truth that truth itself, like buildings, can be manufactured.

The pity of it was that this discovery, if such it was, now seemed so stale, so profitless to me. What good was it? What good did thinking ever do?

No man can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips.