We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.