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

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.