Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

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.

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.