A More Exciting Life: A guide to greater freedom, spontaneity and enjoyment

We die with our particular appetites and intense sensations tragically unexplored.

What am I really trying to do? What do I actually enjoy and who am I trying to please? How would I feel if what I’m currently doing comes right? What will I regret in a decade’s time? By contrast, the easy bit can be the running around, the never pausing to ask why, the repeatedly ensuring that there isn’t a moment to have doubts or feel sad or sea

To learn how to assert oneself steadily and graciously might be ranked as a feat no less worthy of celebration (and much more useful) than climbing a mountain or making a fortune.

At the root of our failures lies one woefully familiar psychological problem: self-hatred. It is because we haven’t learnt to love and respect ourselves that we say nothing, believing that we have no right to take our own positions seriously.

Furthermore, the flatterer tells their prey about their strengths, whereas the reassurer does something infinitely more valuable: they hint that they have seen the weaknesses, but have only tolerance and compassion for them on the basis of sharing fully in comparable examples.

everyone is in deep need of reassurance. Life is a more or less ongoing emergency for everyone. We are invariably haunted by doubts about our value, concerns for our future, shapeless anxiety and dread about things we’ve done, and feelings of guilt and embarrassment about ourselves.

However impressive it may superficially be never to show weakness, it is much more impressive to have the courage, psychological insight and self-discipline to talk about one’s weaknesses in a boundaried and contained way.

True toughness isn’t about maintaining a facade of military robustness, but about an artful negotiation with, and unfrightened acceptance of, one’s regressive, dependent aspects.

we can count on one thing about anyone we meet: they will be beset by a sense of insecurity and, beneath some excellent camouflage, of desperation.