Let’s be honest: who really wants a partner? Nobody wants the responsibility, we only want the good parts. But avoiding responsibility in any relationship inevitably leads to pain, and that’s a way heavier load down the line. It’s better to pick it up voluntarily. Also, short-term fun means you’re so starved for intimacy that you’d be willing to let someone you don’t really like to get in your bed. That’s your standard? Really?

There is not such thing as a casual relationship, a serious relationship or anything in between. There is only relationships, and effort.

If caring is not rewarded, if effort has no value, then meaning is lost.

“There really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being, who is other than you and not under your control, to do for you what you want because they like it. And you on your side would want to do something for them that way, so as to give pleasure to the other person.”

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” That is the voice of authenticity.

Every time you hurt someone, you accrue a kindness debt. This is what makes you ashamed: you could have done better, you could have been more, you could have aimed towards Good.

I saw a four-year old boy allowed to go hungry on a regular basis. His nanny had been injured, and he was being cycled through the neighbors for temporary care. When his mother dropped him off at our house, she indicated that he wouldn’t eat at all, all day. “That’s OK,” she said. It wasn’t OK (in case that’s not obvious).

Noninterference is not really possible unless one has dissipated the fog of expectations and desires that keeps one from experiencing the world as it is in itself (Tao), and the judgment that “something must be done” is usually part of that fog.

Atlas, who voluntarily takes the world on his shoulders. It’s like the idea of Christ taking the sins of the world on his shoulders. It’s exactly the same notion, which is that you should be able to recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity and take responsibility for it, because that’s what that means. And the thing that’s so interesting about it is that if you can recognize in yourself all the horror of humanity, you will instantly have a hell of a lot more respect for yourself than you did before.

In the immediate aftermath of the birth control pill there was the idea that sex could now be decontextualized. First of all that it could occur in the absence of permanent relationships, let’s say; and that that would be an OK thing. And that it could also be something that could be done casually for recreation and without guilt.

If you have a relationship with someone, it is predicated on trust. Part of the reason for that is that trust is what enables us to look at each other without running away screaming. And what I mean by that is that, if I trust you, I don’t have to take into account how complicated you are, because you’re horribly complicated. You know, chimpanzee full of snakes, that’s what a human being is. And as long as you’ll do what you say you’ll do then I can take you at your word and your word simplifies you, and you can take me at my word and my word simplifies me, and then we can act like we understand each other even though we don’t.

To a large degree you can determine the manner in which the world manifests itself to you by changing your aim. And that opens up… the entire domain of philosophy. What good is philosophy? People think that all the time.

The wind is slapping my ears. I hear nothing, but I see the edge: where the rock meets oblivion. I stop and stand for a moment, several yards away. Straight ahead, it’s a sheer drop of at least fifty yards.