“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.”
― On Love
― On Love
“On a grand scale, this explains why grandparents typically have a calmer approach to bringing up children than parents do. The grandparents have a more accurate grasp of how normal – and therefore less alarming – many problems are. Their calm is based on two key bits of knowledge. They know that whatever is done, one’s children will turn out very far from perfect – and therefore the intensely agitating worry that one might be making a mistake is usually a bit misplaced. But they also grasp that even when things go a bit wrong, children will generally cope well enough. Their sense of danger and their sense of hope have both been made more accurate by experience. History encourages the less panicky sides of ourselves.”
― Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury
― Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury
“We’ve got a model for how to do this – though it comes in a slightly unfortunate guise. Religions have often ensured that their followers would meet with the Sublime on a weekly basis, in a cathedral or church somewhere not very far from where they lived. They constructed buildings specifically designed to awe the congregation. But they didn’t just hope that people would drop by. They put a date in the diary, every week. If you lived in the Vienna suburb of Wieden, for instance, you’d go to the Karlskirche at 11.00am every Sunday and be confronted with the Sublime. This beneficial psychological service is in reality distinct from the specifically religious convictions that orchestrated it. But the decline of organised religious faith in many parts of the world has inadvertently also taken away this collective commitment to regularly reactivating our sense of the Sublime.”
― Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury
― Calm: Educate Yourself in the Art of Remaining Calm, and Learn how to Defend Yourself from Panic and Fury
“Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV. JERRY SEINFELD”
― Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
― Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships
“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone thinks I am shy, I will probably end up shy, if someone thinks me funny, I am likely to keep cracking jokes.”
― On Love
― On Love
Dlxneamtu’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Dlxneamtu’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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