After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

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.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.