A Cena Estética

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Though such sensory blindness is often rather welcome […], it is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

The finest thing about betrayal and jealousy – its ability to generate the intellectual motivation necessary to investigate the hidden sides of others.

Only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs [...].

Because the rhythm of a conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

The happiness which may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception, it reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything deficient about them.

[…] blame memory rather than what is remembered.

The limits to eternity didn’t lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

A picture’s beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.