Sublime

like any good crisis point it forces Michael to confront his earlier actions.

This is why some of our noblest thinkers have felt obliged to hope for another life. Not for their own sake, not because they selfishly wanted their own lives to go on for ever, but in order to squeeze some moral sense out of the universe and even out its colossal injustices.

You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture—but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life.

The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as pathological, though private practice and certain lyrical strains of poetry seem still to bear witness to its ideality

What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals—from yourself and from society—depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet. You have to picture all the values that guide why you do things in your life, Tim said, as being l

the words of Henry David Thoreau played on repeat in my head: ‘Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.’

belief, as we saw in the case of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, carries its own meaning and justification within itself. It is believed because it is believed.

the reality genre.