“Your goodness must have an edge to it,” noted Emerson, who was famously good, “else it is none.”

“Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children,” is the wisdom of Anthony Powell’s Stringham, in A Buyer’s Market. “They don’t fulfill the promise of their early youth.”

An actor is measured by the danger--the cost--of the roles he takes on. That's what has always made Daniel Day-Lewis remarkable, and it's what is beginning to distinguish Eddie Redmayne. See The Good Nurse for confirmation of this.

Around me in Japan every toddler is taught the most fundamental lesson in life: think about yourself and you’ll get miserable and in knots; think about others and you’ll feel liberated and fulfilled. Never fails.

In coming to America, the Pilgrims were not, perhaps, as they thought, abandoning society to create a new, and better, society. They were abandoning society to make new homes in the wilderness, amidst darkness and divinity.

Only one song for New Year’s Day: “Down to Joy” by the ageless Van Morrison, still the singer most at home in the heavens and best able to transmit cloudless delight. And only one album: "Remembering Now."

England and Japan are so similar in many ways, except that the winter in Japan is so blue-skied and invigorating, which says something about both the soul and the temperament.

In the age of the selfie, the true artist is the one who tries to take himself out of the picture.

“I am Siam-ish” is Thailand’s characteristically witty and playful reponse to its global nature.

Cultures, as much as individuals, have a secret hidden self as much as a self they present to the world—and woe betide any visitor who mistakes one for the other!

’Feed yourself first,” wrote Augustine, as if to remind us why we need to go on retreat, “and then only will you be able to give to others.”

The challenge of life is surely never to search, but always to be open to be found.

First Aaron Rodgers, then Joe Flacco. Now Philip Rivers. Next thing you know, Dan Marino may be flinging passes again in the NFL.

Chris Rea’s “September Blue” was the haunting soundtrack to autumn in Kyoto. He wrote a song for Christmas, too, hoping Van Morrison would sing it. He will be deeply missed this holiday season.

“His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.” So writes dry Anthony Powell in his Question of Upbringing.

The conservationist has to appeal to consciousness as much as action since, as Aldo Leopold pointed out 75 years ago, wilderness is a “resource which can shrink but not grow.”

To believe in yourself can be as useful as believing in your underpants; which self do you have faith in and how deep does it go?

It’s so easy to be captive to the notion—or is it the illusion?—of great freedom.

We all know the unfriendly truth: give up a lot for any relationship and you gain the world. Seek to gain something from it and you lose it all.

“It is always easier to be extravagant,” wrote Camus, who knew how to be rich and how to be poor, “when you have nothing.”