Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

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

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.