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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d328fbe | The questions had become: What can we forgive in others? How far do they have to go before we lose faith in them? | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| ec612dd | There's a lot of degradation in sex, isn't there?" "When it's done right." | sex | Hanif Kureishi | |
| e256ac4 | People go their whole lives wanting to be admired for their hidden qualities. | people qualities | Hanif Kureishi | |
| 08e339d | Most people don't know how to maximise their pleasure, they sexualise their pain. Surely you've noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they're not turned on by. | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| bd20e52 | l tkfH tHt 'y Zrf kn . lkfH jhl ! nh Hkm@ fTry@ . tb` msh`rk fqT w f`l mtHbh. yrd tyd by's : dh tb`t msh`ry ll`yn@ swf yfsd kl shy | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| d2ff2ee | The "master" would always be the one who could wait without anxiety;" | Hanif Kureishi | ||
| 3e07639 | A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow. | Manuel Rivas | ||
| e5107d3 | She tell many Cathy story, but I still think your daughter good girl." He nodded reassuringly to Mom. "Except for time start car on fire," he admitted. Then... little worry." | Sean Stewart | ||
| 2242c5f | Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America's flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture- or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems- but they were certainly willing to read .. | Michael Korda | ||
| d015b01 | Running twenty-six miles is no fun. I think it was possibly an American who came up with the adage 'if it ain't hurting, it ain't working'. It would be nice to think that shortly after he uttered those words someone smacked him in the mouth by way of demonstrating how well it was working for him. | Tony Hawks | ||
| 079b2be | Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend. | empathy friendship love support | Alain de Botton | |
| b01d67f | There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 5b48789 | Perfectiunea exercita o anume tiranie, aproape o epuizare, ceva care neaga privitorului un rol in propria creatie si care se impune cu tot dogmatismul unei afirmatii lipsite de ambiguitate. Adevarata frumusete nu poate fi masurata pentru ca fluctueaza, exosta numai cateva unghiuri din care poate fi vazuta si nici atunci in orice luminp si in orice moment. Flirteaza periculos cu uratenia, isi asuma riscuri, nu se aliniaza confortabil cu regu.. | eseuri-de-îndrăgostit frumusețe on-love perfecțiune | Alain de Botton | |
| 1fcfa5b | A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. "Beauty is the promise of happiness," he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention." | Alain de Botton | ||
| 59e5d52 | The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police). | Alain de Botton | ||
| 8d36ca9 | wisdom lies in correctly discerning where we are free to mould reality according to our wishes and where we must accept the unalterable with tranquillity. The | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7a1e87e | W]e all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite | Alain de Botton | ||
| 0486ff2 | In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way. | chaos concern news peace serenity violence worry | Alain de Botton | |
| dbd968c | doubts only inflame desire. As Rabih has realized, the most attractive people aren't those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgement) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons - perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection - leave.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1811fdf | E surprinzator cat de des respingerea in dragoste este exprimata in limbajul moralitatii, limbajul aceea ce e corect si ce nu, a ceea ce e bun si ce e rau, ca si cand a respinge sau a nu respinge, a iubi sau a nu iubi este ceva ce apartine in mod natural unei ramuri a eticii. E surprinzator cat de des cel care respinge este etichetat ca fiind rau, iar cel respins ajunge sa intruchipeze binele. | Alain de Botton | ||
| d690fa9 | Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes. | Alain de Botton | ||
| eefc2ef | The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 1a8c344 | If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination. | Alain de Botton | ||
| db17df6 | Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect. | Alain de Botton | ||
| f86cb6f | Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicit a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 15b1c14 | We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it's patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with--and forgive--the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 872f3d0 | Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 3e55823 | The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based aorund such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sw.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 034ba2b | We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired, | Alain de Botton | ||
| 6de8b5d | In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough. | Alain de Botton | ||
| e3231c1 | A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe. | Alain de Botton | ||
| d83ffbf | Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one | Alain de Botton | ||
| a682557 | Interest did not naturally belong to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cem.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 654177a | Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic, self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else's call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| de72239 | you were better making history than studying it. | Irvine Welsh | ||
| aabe721 | The offerings of Machiavelli (1469-1527), Guicciardini (1483-1540), La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) and La Bruyere (1645-96) give us an indication of the manoeuvres that workers may, aside from their regular advertised roles, have to perform in order to flourish: The need to beware of colleagues: 'Men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to others' interests, that yo.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| bc08ec1 | We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. WE can be a little tricky to be .. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 84708af | There is a certain tyranny about perfection, a certain exhaustion about it even, something that denies the viewer a role in its creation and that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of an unambiguous statement. True beauty cannot be measured because it is fluctuating, it has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 48e3291 | The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion. By | Alain de Botton | ||
| fc85c10 | In February 62, Seneca came up against an unalterable reality. Nero ceased to listen to his old tutor, he shunned his company, encouraged slander of him at court and appointed a bloodthirsty praetorian prefect, Ofonius Tigellinus, to assist him in indulging his taste for random murder and sexual cruelty. Virgins were taken off the streets of Rome and brought to the emperor's chambers. Senators' wives were forced to participate in orgies, an.. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 7e10a27 | Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. | Alain de Botton | ||
| b88cdbb | Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love. | Alain de Botton | ||
| af79887 | We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends. | Alain de Botton | ||
| 77fa392 | khtbfrwshyh rzshmndtryn mqSd frd tnh st. gwh yn mr t`dd khtbhyy st khh `lt ngrsh anh yn bwdh khh nwysndgnshn khsy r bry Hrf zdn pyd nkhrdhnd. | کتاب کتاب-فروشی | Alain de Botton |