Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.