Must being in love always mean being in pain?

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

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

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.