There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

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

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.