One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
authors books self writing
We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.
life melodrama relationships self significance sorrows
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
aging learning life self self-knowledge
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
newspapers self strangeness weirdness
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
bad-habits others self
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
imagination self