The School of Life: Quotes to Live By: A collection to revive and inspire

Rather than feel guilt, people who have hurt us typically start to hate us – for reminding them of their cruelty.

When we are around small children who frustrate us, we don’t declare them evil; we find less alarming ways of interpreting the origins of their difficult behaviour: perhaps they are getting a bit tired, their gums are sore or they are upset by the arrival of a younger sibling. Given how immature every adult necessarily remains, the moves we execute

It takes time and experience to realise that we cannot, in the end, rescue anyone – at best, just facilitate certain moves they were on their way to making anyway.

Marriage ceremony: a couple making hopeful vows on behalf of two people whom they don’t know – and who won’t exist for another twenty years.

In love, rather than being heralded as perfect, it is a great deal more reassuring, and therefore romantic, to be recognised as deeply flawed – but on that basis, deserving of boundless tenderness and patience.

The true test of moral character: how we treat people who can do nothing for us.

Untrustworthy people are always berating us ‘to trust more’ – rather than working on offering us genuine reasons to do so.

The partner best suited to us is not one who happens to share our every taste; it is the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we have opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.

A goal of parenting: to make offspring feel so special for a time, they’ll later have the strength to acknowledge and make their peace with their true insignificance.