Love thinkers interpret everyone as having strengths alongside their obvious weaknesses. When they encounter these weaknesses, they do not conclude that this is all there is; they know that almost everything on the negative side of a ledger could be connected up with something on the positive.

we are each of us like a fountain, configured out of diverse, separate impulses, desires, attitudes and concerns that from a distance (seen by another person) give off an impression of being unified and coherent.

‘The statue is already in the stone’, he wrote, ‘my work is to liberate it.’

Vagueness is a problem because it means failing to pick out what really matters to us

Our world places a high premium on good ideas but spends tragically little time planning how best to line up our minds to generate them.

What this tells us is that the genius doesn’t have different kinds of thoughts from the rest of us; they simply take them more seriously.

To nurture a more empathetic mindset, we should more often put ourselves aside, forget our ingrained way of seeing things and dissolve our habitual narcissism in order to enter into the foreign experiences of another being.

The single greatest spur towards a loving perspective on others is awareness that we are also imperfect.

Looking at the world through the eyes of love, we conclude that there is no such thing as a simply bad person, and no such thing as a monster. There is only ever pain, anxiety and suffering that have coalesced into unfortunate action.