The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.