The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

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

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.