It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.