We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

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.

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.