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

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

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.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.