The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.