Focus on someone else’s problems for a change, I instructed myself. You need the practice. From now on you’ll have to live in a world you didn’t make up. Horrible thought.

Like true philosophers I've come to believe that religion is an illusion of childhood, outgrown after proper education.

People loved you in the way they knew how - and often it was not the way you knew. Or needed.

He needed fresh air and sunshine. A walk in the woods and afterward a good book to read by the fire. Yeah, that was the life.

Cops before breakfast.Before coffee even. As if Mondays weren't bad enough.

If there was one life skill everyone on the planet needed, it was the ability to think with critical objectivity

Rachel delivered it like an official pronouncement. Like she was one of the fairies gifting Sleeping Beauty's christening: Beauty. Intelligence. Heterosexual.

To find them all in one package...well, perhaps better not to dwell on his package in my fragile state.

I thought of the words of the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne. "If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

The only thing worse than opera is someone who hums along with opera.

I don't know if real courage lies in storming barricades or simply not denying the truth.

The U.K. should begin with an FAnd have a C after the U, And it should end in E DNow that we’ve left the E.U.

Silence is fine if I am on my own but it's not overly sociable if my husband is around!

If you don’t believe others can end your suffering, why believe they can end your happiness?

There is no philosopher in the world so great but he believes a million things on the faith of other people and accepts a great many more truths than he demonstrates.

Meditation is the only way to freedom from stress as it is a dimension beyond the mind. All the stress and struggle are of the mind.

People who were so good. There were angels.

Today's human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow's conflicts.

Reason is an action of the mind; knowledge is a possession of the mind; but faith is an attitude of the person. It means you are prepared to stake yourself on something being so.

Cocktail parties ... are usually not parties at all but mass ceremonials designed to clear up at one great stroke a wealth of obligations.

Men love their vices and hate them at the same time.