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.

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

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 certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.