Humanity is vastly better at engineering than philosophy: our planes are a good deal more impressive than our notions of what we should travel for; our abilities to communicate definitively outstrip our ideas of how to understand one another.

We fail to draw courage from witnessing the struggles of those we admire. What alarms us is not so much how hard the task is but how easy we imagined it might be.

and put into focus what we happen to think. It’s through contact with the books of others that we might come to a clearer sense of our perspectives and ideas.

A central step in ‘mad’ thinking is to temporarily set aside the normal (but not always wise) restrictions on our imaginations.

Love is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.

We put a lot more effort into becoming ‘successful’ than into assessing how dominant notions of success could make us content.

Our world places a high premium on good ideas but spends tragically little time planning how best to line up our minds to generate them.

They do not aggravate a febrile situation through self-righteousness – a symptom of not knowing oneself too well and of a selective memory.

The way properly to enter the mind of another person is not to forget about oneself entirely; rather, it is to use one’s knowledge of oneself to penetrate the consciousness of another. The best way to unearth the secrets of complete strangers is to look honestly into our own hearts.