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. - Alain de Botton

For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know — without ever having constructed one ourselves — that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.