You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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.
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.