We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

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

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.