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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.

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Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes...more

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It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the d...more

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

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A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

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The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevatin...more

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We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling th...more

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[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ...more

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Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never str...more

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Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to insti...more

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It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) tha...more

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Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea th...more

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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wi...more