“I think we moderns lack love,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war.

The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to love, wounding ourselves and each other.

Over and over, in her novels and her essays, in her letters and her journals, Woolf tried to locate love, to anneal it, to define it in order to reinstate it at the center of life.

“To love makes one solitary,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway a generation before Sylvia Plath contemplated the loneliness of love — because “nothing is so strange when one is in love… as the complete indifference of other people.”

Two years later, she set out to “throw light upon the question of love” in To the Lighthouse, to illuminate its “thousand shapes.”

Nothing, she wrote, could be “more serious… more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death.”

Against “the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its scrupulosity,” she pitted the kind of love “that never attempted to clutch its object but, like the love that mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.” She found it “helpful” and “exalting” to know that people could love like that.

At its best, at its truest, the experience of falling in love partakes of that exaltation, that transcendent participancy in the order of things. She captures the phase transition as her characters flood with “being in love”:

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting [was] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

Above all, perhaps, love is a function of time and chance, time and choice — an equivalence that Woolf conjures up on the pages of Orlando, drawing on her relationship with Vita Sackville-West to compose what Vita’s son would later call “the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.” Here, to love someone is to choose them again and again day after day, century after century, as they change and morph and fluctuate across the spectrum of being, to continue to see and cherish the kernel of the person beneath the costume of personality, the soul beneath the self. In this sense, love is a revelation of the essence — “something central,” she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, that permeates the fabric of a person, “something warm” that breaks up the surface and ripples the “cold contact” between people:

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation… an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.

The great tragedy of human life is that we ask of love everything and gives us an almost; the great triumph is that we know this, know the price of the illumination, and we choose to love anyway.

My next book, Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives, will be published on April 1. In this book, I’ve distilled the lessons I’ve learned (and often re-learned) the hard way. To express these “secrets,” I’ve written more than two hundred aphorisms. 

People have asked me, “Why write in aphorisms?” 

For my whole life, I’ve loved the literary form of the aphorism. An aphorism is a concise statement that contains an expansive truth. Unlike the folk wisdom of proverbs—“A stumble may prevent a fall” or “You can’t push a rope”—aphorisms can be attributed to a partic­ular person.

Brief and sharp, aphorisms distill big ideas into few words; by saying little, they manage to suggest more. The clarity of their language promotes the clarity of our thinking.

As a child, I collected aphorisms in my “blank books”—books with blank pages that I filled with quo­tations illustrated by magazine cuttings. Once I be­came a writer exploring human nature, my admiration for the form grew, because the greatest aphorists grapple with the same fundamental questions I explore in my own work: How can we live happier, healthier, more productive, and creative lives?

The right aphorism, recalled at the right time, can shift our perspective instantly. When my family debated whether to get a dog, I was stuck in an endless pro/con analysis—until I remembered, “Choose the bigger life.” Decision made. We got the dog.

My bookshelves overflow with works by great aphorists: La Rochefoucauld (“It is much easier to stifle a first desire than to gratify all those that follow it”), Samuel Johnson (“All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle”), and Sarah Manguso (“Failure is good preparation for success, which comes as a pleasant surprise, but success is poor preparation for failure.”) Fiction, too, is an unexpected source of aphorisms, such as Iris Murdoch’s “Curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.”

These days, the aphorism is a mostly neglected art—though sometimes it pops up in its lesser forms, like the self-improvement cliché on social media or the office poster’s reminder about the value of teamwork.

This ancient discipline, however, still has tremendous power to communicate.

Because we must decide whether we agree or dis­agree, aphorisms provoke our reflection. We can also compare how different aphorists express a similar idea, as they often do, or contemplate how they contradict each other. For instance, Publilius Syrus observed, “No man is happy who does not think himself so,” while Vauvenargues wrote, “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”

The discipline of the aphorism forces precision of thinking. In my own writing, I’ve found that I can ex­press a big idea in a few words only if I truly under­stand what I’m trying to say.

And, as demonstrated by the haiku, the sonnet, and the thirty-minute sitcom, imagination is often better served by constraint than by freedom.

For years, I’ve refined my own aphorisms, weeding out observations that lack broader truth (such as “The tulip is an empty flower”). My book Secrets of Adulthood gathers my best aphorisms—guidance for those just entering adulthood and those still grappling with its challenges. Some aphorisms stand alone, others benefit from brief stories.

At the end, I also include practical hacks that, while not deeply philosophical, improve everyday life (for instance, “If you can’t find something, clean up”).

What a joy it has been to work on my Secrets of Adulthood, to distill my observations and experi­ences into general truths! After all, work is the play of adulthood.