“What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.”

There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.

Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

No, I’m not (disappointed). There’s no reason to be because I’m on an incredible run. You always expect a loss once in a while. So when it happens, why be disappointed if I win over 90% of my matches.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Trying to do it all and expecting that it all can be done exactly right is a recipe for disappointment. Perfection is the enemy.

If I disappoint someone, it’s their loss for putting that expectation on me when they don’t know me. I can’t control what they want.

Things don’t always turn out exactly the way you want them to be and you feel disappointed. You are not always going to be the winner. That’s when you have to stop and figure out why things happened the way they did and what you can do to change them.

If someone has offended you, insulted you, or disappointed you, let it go! If you are remembering all the ways you have been hurt or forgotten, let it go! Ask yourself, what good does it do for me to hold on to this?

I left everything I had to become an actor. So, I better be excited, or otherwise, there is no point in doing all this. Else I would end up being disappointed with whatever I achieve.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.