Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

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.