In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offer… - Alain de Botton

It is hope — with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet — that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.

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.