“I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.”

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

They’re partners in a big house where there are two separate courts, and they both know they have two separate courts. But these are courts that are allied in purpose, united in vision.

I am Dracula, and I bid you welcome . . .

I count on the kindness of strangers.

The more you prepare beforehand, the more relaxed and creative and effective you’ll be when it counts.

When you’re happy, you don’t count the years.

It’s not the words but the music that counts.

Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society’s tools, neither more nor less.

You are a divine being. You matter, you count. You come from realms of unimaginable power and light, and you will return to those realms.