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

Because everyone refrains from uttering their truths, the price of breaking cover remains impossibly high.

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.

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.

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.

In our eyes, the price of safety is the maintenance of a permanent semblance of composure.

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.

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.

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.