Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.