French novelist Marcel Proust devoted his work to exploring memory, perception, and the ways people often misread their own lives as they’re living them. This observation from “Swann’s Way,” the first volume of his seven-part novel “In Search of Lost Time,” reflects his fascination with time as something revealed through memory rather than fully understood in the present. Proust suggests that people’s unhappiness feels exaggerated in the moment because they lack the distance needed to recognize what’s sustaining them while it’s happening. His insight invites us to resist catastrophizing our emotions, reminding us that the moments in our lives that feel uncertain or imperfect may later reveal themselves as meaningful or less dire than we’d thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche is typically associated with intellectual gravitas, but this quote sounds downright playful. It isn’t just the physical act of dancing being described here so much as the German philosopher’s broader view that life is what we make of it. Alongside vitality, we should strive for the flexibility and the courage to embrace life even in the face of uncertainties. A day without that “dance,” Nietzsche suggests in his novel “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” is a kind of loss. He goes on to say, “And let each truth be false to us which was not greeted by one laugh!”