More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.
Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of Being, but most refuse to do so, despite their suffering and disappointments and losses and inadequacies and ugliness, and again that is a miracle for those with the eyes to see it.
treat yourself as if you were someone you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want.”
“Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good.”
You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel.
It would be good to make the world a better place. Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord. We will have to work to bring it about,
Chris had been left unattended to in some important way. Despite his intelligence and curiosity he was angry, resentful and without hope.
We were all too prematurely cynical and world-weary and leery of responsibility to stick to the debating clubs and Air Cadets and school sports
In a small town, everyone knows who you are. You drag your years behind you like a running dog with tin cans tied to its tail. You can’t escape who you have been.
when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past.
Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so
Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.” He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past—sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more pre...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
not easy to distinguish between someone truly wanting and needing help and someone who is merely exploiting a willing helper.
The person who tries and fails, and is forgiven, and then tries again and fails, and is forgiven, is also too often the person who wants everyone to believe in the authenticity of all that trying.
the attempt to rescue someone is often fuelled by vanity and narcissism.
Sam Devine! Lol
a villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero.
How do you know that your attempts to pull someone up won’t instead bring them—or you—further down?
You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier.
failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation.
To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits. You just have to bide your time. And once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished.
Much of what they could have been has dissipated, and much of the less that they have become is now real.
desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.
If I stay in an unhealthy relationship with you, perhaps it’s because I’m too weak-willed and indecisive to leave, but I don’t want to know it.
console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself, “Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone—that has to be a good person.”
just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being g...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
instead of continuing our friendship I should just go off somewhere, get my act toget...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fuelled confidence of the victor.
Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.
Or you could learn how to entice yourself into sustainable, productive activity.
You’re a singular being, once you’re an adult. You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise.
You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue.
Because we always contrast what is with what could be, we have to aim at what could be.
How can we benefit from our imaginativeness, our ability to improve the future, without continually denigrating our current, insufficiently successful and worthless lives?
The future is like the past. But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future—it could be better.
What you aim at determines what you see.
“sustained inattentional blindness.”
That’s how you deal with the overwhelming complexity of the world: you ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private concerns.
it has to be that way, because there is much more of the world than there is of you.
Life doesn’t have the problem. You do.
If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself.
You might think, “I will make a different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better—whatever that might be—and I will start working on it now.
making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining
arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
There is nothing magical here—or nothing more than the already-present magic of consciousness. We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that’s most of it) is hidden.
we start aiming at something different—something like “I want my life to be better”—our minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the previously hidden world, to aid us in that pursuit.
we must become conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange them into hierarchies.
study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such study can render us more sophisticated in our choices.
Religion concerns itself with the domain of value, ultimate value. That is not the scientific domain.
