However much postcolonial condescension and racism and machismo there might be mixed up in an aid worker’s urge to help suffering foreigners, that seemed less awful than isolation and unrepentant selfishness.

To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship.

To judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better. It’s to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically in response to what is expected of them.

He wasn’t good at meditation – he found serenity difficult – but discomfort came naturally.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Excessive altruism tended to preclude real intimacy with another person, because intimacy was a business of giving and receiving, but the overly moral person could not receive, only give.

He believed that a person who had not felt pain, mental or physical, was incapable of strong attachments, and that shared suffering was the mortar of community. Pain broke a man open and let other people in; suffering was at the core of what it meant to be human.

The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.

Trying to help is at best useless and at worst damaging; but to stop trying to help is to give up on humanity. Humanitarians are condescending hypocrites, but they are the best of us.

To judge is to believe that a person is capable of doing better. It's to know that people can change their behavior, even quite radically in response to what is expected of them.