It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.