There is no way of steering successfully between a failed situation and a failed self except by stopping and taking our bearings.

It is rewarding to find someone you like, but it is essential to like yourself. It is quickening to recognize that someone is a good and decent human being, but it is indispensable to view yourself as acceptable. It is a delight to discover people who are worthy of respect and admiration and love, but it is vital to believe yourself deserving of these things.

Examining love is like examining a stocking: if you hold it up to the light and stretch it to search for snags, any snags there are may well run and ruin the stocking. In fact, if I may fashion Coudert's law from Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, it is this: Love is not only changed by observation; it is changed for the worse.

A cruel joke has been played on us. We are fated always to remember what we learned but never to recall the experiences that taught us. Who can remember being born? Yet, it is possible to speculate that anxiety has its roots in this experience, that dread of abandonment, fears of separation, intolerable loneliness go back to this moment. Who can remember being cared for as an infant? ... Who can remember being toilet-trained? ... Who can remember the attachment which developed to the parent of the opposite sex? ... We cannot remember but what we have forgotten lives on dynamically.

The unlived life is not worth examining. ... Self-awareness, self-examination, self-consciousness are for the quiet moments. In the arena they are paralyzing. The self must not be held out of the arena until living skills have been learned.

cookbooks, I found, are intended for people with time to cook - and, surprisingly often, for people who already know how to cook.

What nonsense it is, this desire to be without limitations, this wish always to be seen in the most flattering light. We are anxious, not because we think so little of ourselves, but because we think so much of ourselves. We are anxious, not that we may appear in the worst light, but that we may not appear in the best light. Anxiety is born of self-consciousness, and it is alleviated to the exact extent that we can drop consciousness of the self.