The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things