Sublime

If you had the right things, he argued, you wouldn’t need many things.

We’re so familiar with this polarization, we regard it as if it were an inevitable fact of nature, rather than what it really is: a cultural and commercial failing. Ideally artists should absorb the best qualities of business and vice versa. Rather than seeing such qualities as opposed to what they stand for as artists or business people, they shou

art is a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide for catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.

The one question rarely asked is whether there might be a way to ameliorate the dispiriting choice, to draw on the best aspects of consumerism on the one hand and high-mindedness on the other without suffering their worst consequences: moral decadence and profound poverty. Might it be possible for a society to develop that allows for consumer spend

We might choose to live outside a large metropolis, not to push ourselves forward for promotion, to avoid the limelight, and to do a satisfactory but undramatic kind of work. We can discover the subtle greatness of a life in which we exercise our virtues on a domestic canvas, in which we do not seek to be known by people we don’t ourselves know and

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is the desire to hold on to it: to possess it and give it weight in our lives. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.’

The good child has been deprived of one of the central ingredients of a properly privileged upbringing: the experience of other people witnessing and surviving their mischief.

The loving companion doesn’t get bored of instilling the same fundamental message: I am here for you and it will be OK.