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August 3 - August 6, 2025
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation.
The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence.
The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in ...
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moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good t...
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akrasia, commonly translated as ‘weakness of will’, a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right.
What separates the sane insane from the simply insane is the honest, personable and accurate grasp they have on what is not entirely right with them.
The melancholy know that many of the things we most want are in tragic conflict: to feel secure and yet to be free; to have money and yet not to have to be beholden to others; to be in close-knit communities and yet not to be stifled by the expectations and demands of society; to explore the world and yet to put down deep roots; to fulfil the demands of our appetites for food, sex and sloth and yet stay thin, sober, faithful and fit.
Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions. The first asks what we might be anxious about right now.
A philosophical meditation moves on to a second enquiry: what am I upset about right now?
The third question to consider within a philosophical meditation is: what am I ambitious and excited about right now?
Du mußt dein Leben ändern. [You must change your life.]
breakdown isn’t just a pain, though it is that too of course; it is an extraordinary opportunity to learn.
Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
But people don’t have affairs because they are able to meet attractive others, they have affairs because they feel emotionally disconnected from their partners.
Beneath the surface of almost every argument lies a forlorn attempt by two people to get the other to see, acknowledge and respond to their emotional reality and sense of justice.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘fuck you’s).
all of these may be emerging from the repeated frustrated attempt to transmit a single intimate truth: I feel you don’t respect my intelligence.
Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.
They are not fundamentally ashamed of themselves because they have already shed so much of their pride.
The wise are comparably realistic about other people.