He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.