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.

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.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.