Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittl… - Oliver Burkeman

The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it's worth paying.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,' argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. 'Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.' Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.

To rest for the sake of rest — to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake — entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren't progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value.