Robert C. Solomon
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.
There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.
Another question has been raised rather widely in Europe, in Japan as well as in the United States is what, to what extent will the euro become a reserve currency.
The dollar is currently the principal reserve currency in the world.
Chances are the movements of the euro as against the dollar will be relatively moderate.
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.
Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.
The reserve currency role seems to add prestige to an area and some people in Europe have talked about the desirability of the euro becoming an international reserve currency.
Some countries that are close to Europe that already hold Deutschemarks, clearly would automatically hold euros, those are countries in Eastern Europe mainly, a few countries in Africa.
If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.
So if the euro, if Euroland is to become a reserve center, if the euro is to become a reserve currency, Euroland will have to have a deficit in its overall balance of payments.
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.
To the extent that the United States has, I don't like the word hegemony, the United States has influence around the world, I don't think that's based on to any significant degree on the fact that countries use the dollar as their major reserve.
The prices of all imports would rise if the dollar depreciates.
On private transactions, I'll just go very quickly now, a major difference between the United States and Euroland is that in Europe banks are much more important in financial transactions than in the United States.
In the United States, securities markets are much more developed than they are in Europe.
The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.
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.
The dollar went up some eighty percent in real terms as I recall now or something like that - from '80 to '85.
Trust opens up new and unimagined possibilities.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Religious
Trust is built step by step, commitment by commitment, on every level.Collection: Trust
Trust is not bound up with knowledge so much as it is with freedom, the openness to the unknown.Collection: Trust
All trust involves vulnerability and risk, and nothing would count as trust if there were no possibility of betrayal.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Falling In Love
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.Collection: Sex
Thus when I have to summarize naturalized spirituality in a single phrase, it is this: the thoughtful love of life.Collection: Spiritual
Trust is almost always conditional, focused, qualified, and therefore limited.Collection: Trust
Trust is a skill, one that is an aspect of virtually all human practices, cultures, and relationships.Collection: Trust
We also confuse trust with familiarity.Collection: Trust
Trust is a skill learned over time so that, like a well-trained athlete, one makes the right moves, usually without much reflection.Collection: Trust
True, trust necessarily carries with it uncertainties, but we must force ourselves to think about these uncertainties as possibilities and opportunities, not as liabilities.Collection: Trust
Building trust begins with an appreciation and understanding of trust, but it also requires practice and practices.Collection: Trust
Many people are blind to trust, not so much to its benefits as to its nature and the practices that make it possible.Collection: Trust
Trust and the ability to identify trustworthiness are not the same thing, although trust and trustworthiness are logically linked.Collection: Trust
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.Collection: Rain
The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.Collection: Kitsch
The brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer.Collection: Brain
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]Collection: Life
Building trust means thinking about trust in a positive way.Collection: Trust
Familiarity can no longer be a necessary condition for trust.Collection: Trust
Indeed, some kitsch seems to be flawed by its very perfection, its technical virtuosity and its precise execution, its explicit knowledge of the traditionCollection: Perfection
High kitsch, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be openly dismissed as cheap.Collection: May
High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)Collection: Art