Robert C. Solomon Quotes

Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.

What gives life meaning is a form of rebellion, rebellion against reason, an insistence on believing passionately what we cannot believe rationally. The meaning of life is to be found in passion—romantic passion, religious passion, passion for work and for play, passionate commitments in the face of what reason knows to be meaningless.

Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.

Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.

All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.

For all of the advice in the magazines on "How to Keep your Love Alive," the salvation of love is not the prolongation of sexual desire but the shared lifelong cultivation of a romantic lightheartedness that softens conflicts and anxieties and focuses serious attention even as it undermines seriousness as such. It's hard to fall out of love so long as you're laughing together.

Love can be understood only "from the inside," as a language can be understood only by someone who speaks it, as a world can be understood only by someone who lives in it.

Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.

Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.

Trust is a skill, one that is an aspect of virtually all human practices, cultures, and relationships.

We also confuse trust with familiarity.

Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.

True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.

Building trust begins with an appreciation and understanding of trust, but it also requires practice and practices.

Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible.

Trust and the ability to identify trustworthiness are not the same thing, although trust and trustworthiness are logically linked.

Whether one sees the world as God's creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.

The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.

The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.

There's a stability and growth pact which was agreed for the eleven countries which tries to limit the size of budget deficits among the eleven countries.

Spirituality can be severed from both vicious sectarianism and thoughtless banalities. Spirituality, I have come to see, is nothing less than the thoughtful love of life. [Spirituality for the Skeptic]

Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.

There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don't see that connection at all.

The United States as usual has a sizable deficit in the current account of its balance of payments, trade account and other current accounts, current account items.