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.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.