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

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”

“Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decent job, good health, and a roof over her head, did she regularly and so childishly collapse into moist sobs?”

“It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life?Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?”

“Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.”

“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?”

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”