Sublime

The four things are insight, objectivity, courage, and empathy, all wrapped up in a methodology unique to you, governed by a dismissive perspective about your own future—a disregard for how you will survive.

We should ask ourselves: is this a person who would stay by me when everyone else is laughing, who wouldn’t run away if I had no more

Those of a Classical temperament don’t necessarily respect the education system as it stands – there is so much that could be improved – but the abstract idea of education seems essential and the bedrock of civilization. We didn’t forget how to live; we just never knew, as no one is ever born knowing.

We should also be more careful when pursuing things we imagine will spare us anxiety. We can head for them by all means, but for other reasons than fantasies of calm, and with a little less vigour and a little more scepticism. We will still be anxious when we finally have the house, the relationship and the right income.

A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be

But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are. Yet there remains, besides the promises of love and religion, one other – and more solid – resource with which to address our loneliness: culture.