Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

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

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