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?

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

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

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.