Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.

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Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing.

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Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.

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With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.

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Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

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It might be a Proustian slogan: n'allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.

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It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

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When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

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The more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy.

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To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

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