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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 511595d | Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available. | fruit modernity impatience | Alain de Botton | |
| 4901756 | It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided. | work | Alain de Botton | |
| 392f544 | A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily. | tragedy judgmentt forgiveness failure | Alain de Botton | |
| ee4f41f | Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we date to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ce9223c | What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 275133e | One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love. | literature | Alain de Botton | |
| 8493363 | How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships - if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther's | Alain de Botton | ||
| 63acc49 | I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I'd like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0f2edb9 | 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 ba.. | construction complicated complexity elegance design intuition simplicity | Alain de Botton | |
| c78c814 | I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise, but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology ... We readily inquire, 'Does he know Greek or Latin?' 'Can he write poetry and prose?' But what matters most is what we put last: 'Has he become better and wiser?' We ought .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| c757462 | Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism or aggression but, at the rare moments one can imagine it, always love. | love | Alain de Botton | |
| df89823 | Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. | Alain de Botton | ||
| af36342 | What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to ou.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| ce40b6b | It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady mind to contemplate without superstition the enormous probability of a meeting that had turned out to alter our lives. Someone at (30,000 feet) must have been pulling strings in the sky. | Alain de Botton | ||
| af8ece9 | Some things in this world just ain't mean to be, not in the times we want 'em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that's to come. There's a prize at the end of all of it, but still, that's a heavy load to bear. | the-good-lord-bird | James McBride | |
| 7575b82 | The Good Lord Bird don't run in a flock. He Flies alone. You know why? He's searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that's taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till the thing gets tired and it falls down. And the dirt from it raises other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes 'em strong. Gives 'em life. And the.. | nature the-right-thing birds purpose | James McBride | |
| 0a01412 | Stupid. Shortsighted. A man born with a sense for raw opportunity where his soul should have been. Miller's | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d485907 | Well, you've got a full load of torpedoes and bullets, three Martian warships trailing you, one angry old lady in tea withdrawal, and a Martian Marine who could probably kill you with your own teeth. What do you do? | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5b9cc9d | Desperate psychotic people do desperate psychotic things when they're exposed. I refuse to grant them immunity from exposure out of fear of their reaction. When you do, the desperate psychos wind up in charge. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| a9999f1 | No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3382c11 | She'd always found a deep comfort in praying. A profound sense of connection to something infinitely larger than herself. Her atheist friends called it awe in the face of an infinite cosmos. She called it God. That they might be talking about the same thing didn't bother her at all. It was possible she was hurling her prayers at a cold and unfeeling universe that didn't hear them, but that wasn't how it felt. Science had given mankind many .. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| b2efe57 | If you start feeling wonderful and powerful and like you've seen the face of God, you're having a euphoric attack. | face-of-god | James S.A. Corey | |
| 175143c | Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn't pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| be7754f | And what I was feeling was the wonder Of being more than me, of being more Than mere here and now allowed I had become a shining star, a burning nova Exploded with love Flying through an endlessly Expanding universe Away from the me that was Toward a me that is beyond Understanding. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| a4cbf86 | We lie to ourselves here. Maybe we are here because we lie to ourselves. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| b503d44 | Yeah, that's funny, huh?...Something hurts you real bad and you get used to it. Like being hurt becomes part of who you are. | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| 9bbdaff | The problem with Ted isn't that he's humorless. It isn't even his truly reprehensible far-right politics. No, the problem with Ted--and the reason so many senators have a problem with Ted--is simply that he is an absolutely toxic coworker. He's the guy in your office who snitches to corporate about your March Madness pool and microwaves fish in the office kitchen. He is the Dwight Schrute of the Senate. In | Al Franken | ||
| aec1942 | The whole "misery loves company" thing never applies more than when you're breaking up. The thought that the other person is doing fine is simply too much to bear." | Emily Giffin | ||
| c26cb4a | Sorrow comes with so many defense mechanisms. You have your shock, your denial, your getting wasted, your cracking jokes, and your religion. You also have the old standby catchall--the blind belief in fate, the whole "things happening for a reason" drill." | Emily Giffin | ||
| 563f82b | you'd do anything to get a soul mate back, right?... I mean, that's the nature of soul mates. | Emily Giffin | ||
| 7dc8da3 | I think I hoped for something more. Maybe I even hoped that I could find in Richard what I had with Ben. But it is suddenly very clear: Richard is not fallin in love with me and I'm not falling in love with Richard. We are not creating anything permanent or special. We are only having fun together. It is a fling- a fling just like he said last night- a fling with an ending yet to be determined. I feel relieved to have it defined | Emily Giffin | ||
| a5dc07b | The purpose of life is a life of purpose. | Emily Giffin | ||
| e77802b | Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. | memories songs love | Emily Giffin | |
| e875207 | Love is sharing a life together | Emily Giffin | ||
| f429e82 | Throughout the ordeal, I learned that getting mad was easier than being sad. Anger was something I could control. I could settle into an easy rhythm of blame and hate. Focus my energy on something than the ache in my heart. | Emily Giffin | ||
| dd4df5b | We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes. | good-and-evil mankind humanity give-and-take triumph price cost society survival crime sin | H. Rider Haggard | |
| c3c886c | Listen! What is life? It is a feather, it is the seed of the grass, blown hither and thither, sometimes multiplying itself and dying in the act, sometimes carried away into the heavens. But if that seed be good and heavy it may perchance travel a little way on the road it wills. It is well to try and journey one's road and to fight with the air. Man must die. At the worst he can but die a little sooner. | life inspirational | H. Rider Haggard | |
| b7e2936 | We do not dance to reach a certain point on the floor, but simply to dance. Energy itself, as William Blake said, is eternal delight--and all life is to be lived in the spirit of rapt absorption in an arabesque of rhythms. | Alan Wilson Watts | ||
| 8b6029a | Thou art a man God is no more | spiritual | William Blake | |
| 03ac9b0 | Pity would be no more, If we did not make somebody poor. | William Blake | ||
| a58264b | Down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as the nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees and hung over this immensity; but I said: if you please we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether providence is here also. | William Blake | ||
| b6b371d | Women give more than men; young people more than their elders; people who appear to be of the most modest means seem more generous than the affluent looking. | Irvine Welsh | ||
| bf722c4 | To those of us gathered here today, Matthew Connell filled a number of different roles in our lives. Matthew was a son, a brother, a father and a friend. Matthew's last days in his young life were bleak, suffering ones. Yet, we must remember the real Matthew, the loving young man who had a great lust for life. A keen musician, Matthew loved to entertain friends with his guitar playing... Renton could not make eye contact with Spud, standing.. | Irvine Welsh | ||
| 701b35d | Children should be taught about history not as is usually the case now, that this is the record of long past events, which one ought to know about for some reason or other. But that this is a story from which one may learn not only what has happened, but what may, and probably will, happen again. Literature and history, these two great branches of human learning, records of human behaviour, human thought, are less and less valued by the you.. | Doris Lessing |