The School of Life: Quotes to Live By: A collection to revive and inspire

A goal of parenting: to make offspring feel so special for a time, they’ll later have the strength to acknowledge and make their peace with their true insignificance.

Untrustworthy people are always berating us ‘to trust more’ – rather than working on offering us genuine reasons to do so.

Marriage ceremony: a couple making hopeful vows on behalf of two people whom they don’t know – and who won’t exist for another twenty years.

The partner best suited to us is not one who happens to share our every taste; it is the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

Anyone can land on a disturbed partner; the healthy among us can be identified by the speed with which they assess the problem and the decisiveness and deftness with which they can exit.

Rather than feel guilt, people who have hurt us typically start to hate us – for reminding them of their cruelty.

Much of life is about correctly determining on whom and on what we should finally give up.

We shouldn’t be so surprised at the enormous levels of mental illness at large in society; we need only get clear how bad we collectively are at love, how poor we are at lending sympathy, at listening, at offering reassurance, at feeling compassion and at forgiving – and, conversely, how good we are at hating, shaming and neglecting.

The two things we try so hard never to communicate directly to our partners in love: ‘I need you’ and ‘You have hurt me’. We’ll go to any lengths to act out our pain rather than spell out our vulnerability.