The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

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.

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.