Our imagination and reasoning powers facilitate anxiety; the anxious feeling is precipitated not by an absolute impending threat-such as the worry about an examination, a speech, travel-but rather by the symbolic and often unconscious representations.

Life is to be enjoyed, not simply endured. Pleasure and goodness and joy support the pursuit of survival.

Feeling good and feeling bad are not necessarily opposites. Both at least involve feelings. Any feeling is a reminder of life. The worst 'feeling' evidently is non-feeling.

Feelings are the fine instruments which shape decision-making in an animal cursed and blessed with intelligence, and the freedom which is its corollary. They are signals directing us toward goodness, safety, pleasure, and group survival.

Man, the most complicated of the animals, has a relatively short gestation period. Beyond that, he will be born, unlike most mammals, in a ridiculously helpless state.

When men achieve the fruits of their material success, they often become aware of an emptiness--an incompleteness--in their lives;the hollowness of having, but not raising, children, of not making true commitments to them. Which, sadly, does not mean that they weren't capable of it.

We must live in groups; other people are like nutrients for us, and are absolutely essential for our survival.