This is the best - and by far the most useful - book I've read in a long time. It's roughly based on the Stoic philosophers. It is a pleasingly quick, light, and breezy read - particularly for something which may contain the secret of life! My father told me that "attitude is everything". As I go on, I realise he was much righter than I (or perhaps even he) ever knew....   (read more)

So on the very long list of reasons why London rules is the fact that you can just turn up for things, as I did recently, like the annual Faraday Prize & Lecture at the Royal Society. Feeling very jaunty, I guess, I made so bold as to ask a question – and, worse! a metaphysical one. It made it into the video....   (read more)

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In part because I'm struggling to keep my mind wrapped around the Edge books, and in part just to preserve the sense of wonder these engender (and perhaps also as antidote to the logic of human self-destruction in my latest book), I've decided to publish some excerpts. Because it's Christmas, I'm starting with a nice happy one....   (read more)

Pleasingly reminiscent of the Notebooks of Lazarus Long....   (read more)

That's life, that's what all the people say...   (read more)

It suddenly strikes me that the myth of Sisyphus has such profound resonance - that we have a myth of Sisyphus at all - because life itself is essentially a Sisyphean endeavour....   (read more)

In what might perhaps be a semi-regular feature, here's a song so great that I think we should all be singing it for 100 years....   (read more)

Unless he belonged somewhere, unless his life had some meaning and direction, he would feel like a particle of dust and be overcome by his individual insignificance....   (read more)

This is the conclusion that turns up again and again... Everything must be its own reward....   (read more)

It occurs to me today that perhaps the proper antidote to the Existenial Outlook is to regard life instead as an opportunity....   (read more)

"Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle."...   (read more)

"I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant....   (read more)

"How small a fraction of all the measureless infinity of time is allotted to each one of us; an instant, and it vanishes into eternity. How puny, too, is your portion of all the world's substance; how insignificant your share of all the world's soul; on how minute a speck of the whole earth do you creep." ...   (read more)

"He who has a why to live can endure any how." - Nietzsche...   (read more)

My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable....   (read more)

And so in a recent correspondence with my editor, I laid out in some detail the particulars of my literary mission as I conceive it - an amplification of the ideas I put forward some time ago on my words page....   (read more)

In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful....   (read more)

If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world....   (read more)

Specifically, what I mean to ponder is: Has all our scientific and technological progress - in particular, the foundation-rocking understanding of the universe and ourselves that's been granted us by cosmology, astrophysics, geology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, etc. - has all of that grand accumulated wisdom left us without a psychic pot to piss in?...   (read more)