A good half of the art of living is resilience.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.