Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

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

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.