"It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things."

"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."

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

"One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?"

"Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards."

"Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice."

"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."

"What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery."

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

"One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass."

"It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love."

"There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed."

"There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most."

"Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go."

"The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call."

"The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life."

"The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person."

"What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others."

"Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent"

"Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny."

"It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great."

"We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe."

"We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds."

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

"Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time."

"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unf ted but life-enhancing thoughts."

"Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere."

"If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful."

"Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same."

"Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control."

"As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents."

"The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort."

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

"Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person."

"We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it)."

"The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding."

"Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement."

"We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us."

"To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity."

"A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide."

"Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself."

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

"The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

"It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day."

"Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all."

"Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food."

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."

"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."

"Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge."

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