We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.