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

“Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.”

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

“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”

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

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.”

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”