Sublime

Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in big cities than acquaintances. More common not just in places of public assembly, but more

“broken windows theory” of disorder within neighborhoods.

Les livres dans sa chambre, les gens dans la rue, et un regard qui pénètre toutes choses : les pensées et les faits, cela suffit pour construire un monde. Dès l’instant où Balzac se met à travailler il n’existe plus rien de réel autour de lui que ce qu’il crée.

Man’s identification with his idea of himself gives him a specious and precarious sense of permanence. For this idea is relatively fixed, being based upon carefully selected memories of his past, memories which have a preserved and fixed character. Social convention encourages the fixity of the idea because the very usefulness of symbols depends up

They wander through the winding passages of the shopping malls prompted and guided by a semi-conscious hope of bumping into the very identity badge or token needed to bring their selves up to date,

It was built around two interrelated ideas that have been at the core of my whole intellectual activity: (1) human beings are able to achieve only a very bounded rationality, and (2) as one consequence of their cognitive limitations, they are prone to identify with subgoals.