Fellows Of The Royal Society Of Literature

"Two centuries ago, our forbears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. … The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then. but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt."

"The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although—to the more imaginative at least—a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves."

"Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices, telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown our the faint sounds emitted from our souls, and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities."

"Aside from the equation it draws between making money and being good, the modern ideal of a successful life posits a further linkage between making money and being happy. This latter association rests on … assumptions. First, it is presumed that identifying what will make us happy is not an inordinately difficult task. Just as our bodies typically know what they need in order to be healthy… so, too, the theory goes, can our minds to be relied upon to understand what we should aim for so as to flourish as whole human beings. … Second, it is taken for granted that the enormous range of … consumer goods available to modern civilization is not merely a gaudy, enervating show responsible for stoking desires bearing little relevance to our welfare, but is, rather, a helpful array of potentialities and products, capable of satisfying some of our most important needs."

"Deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort’s words, “It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.”"

"The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public’s reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. “One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: “The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition.”"

"Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”"

"To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them."

"We should not be frightened by appearances."

"The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us."

"In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge."

"A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough."

"It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries."

"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."

"By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world."

"Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms."

"Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style."

"We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful."

"Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life."

"Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence."

"Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality."

"Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial."

"Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?"

"We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world."

"Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles."

"Not everyone is worth listening to."

"True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning."

"It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is."

"There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are."

"Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first."

"It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public."

"It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work."

"Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval."

"This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings."

"I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time."

"Life is near-death experience."

"Poetry is a language with a shape"

"In poetry much of the sense and most of the pleasure resides in the sounds the poem make."

"The reader does not need a technical vocabulary to read poetry, only a voice in the head or out loud which can deliver the sounds."

"Prose uses the medium of language whilst poetry serves language and explores it."

"Prose and poetry are different in construction. You can lie back and read prose, and you can read it fast. Poetry on the other hand, requires a different kind of attention and concentration … the effect it has on the ear and the imagination."

"Poetry is a process, a form of discovery, which if it serves a cause, transcends it."

"Poetry is a collaborative art, and yet—as it is being created—the most solitary and 'individual' of activities."

"A living poem can energise another poem at five hundred years distance, or across the other side of the world."

"What matters in poetry is form, how words work together, the sounds and silences their combinations make. The ordered effects they produce on the attentive hearer."

"We read with our ears"

"Education ent only books and music – it's asking questions, all the time. There are millions of us, all over the country, and no one, not one of us, is asking questions, we're all taking the easiest way out."

"And then I saw the menu, stained with tea and beautifully written by a foreign hand, and on top it said…"Chips with everything". Chips with every damn thing. You breed babies and you eat chips with everything."

"If the electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it instead, so I should stop having electricity? I should cut off my light? Socialism is my light, can you understand that?"

"The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away."