Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.