The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.