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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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 | |
| 3ff13b6 | Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing. | Alain de Botton | ||
| a0f8f67 | But at the end of the day, there are some questions that have no answers, and then one answer that has no question: love rules the game. Every time. All the time. That's what counts. | James McBride | ||
| 2677df6 | You have to choose between what the world expects of you and what you want for yourself," my sister Jack told me several times. "Put yourself in God's hands and you can't go wrong." | James McBride | ||
| e6920d1 | The man was the finest preacher. He could make a frog stand up straight and get happy with Jesus. | James McBride | ||
| bf74039 | This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. | James McBride | ||
| 77470a8 | The old face, crinkled and dented with canals running every which way, pushed and shoved up against itself for a while, till a big old smile busted out from beneath 'em all, and his grey eyes fairly glowed. It was the first time I ever saw him smile free. A true smile. It was like looking at the face of God. And I knowed then, for the first time, that him being the person to lead the colored to freedom weren't no lunacy. It was something he.. | slavery humanity god peace | James McBride | |
| 91fea94 | I was ashamed of my mother, but see, love didn't come natural to me until I became a Christian.- Ruth McBride | James McBride | ||
| e81e917 | When Holden pointed out that the Roci was already capable of accelerating fast enough to kill her crew and asked why they'd need to upgrade her, Amos had replied, "Because this shit is awesome." Holden had just nodded and smiled and paid the bill. Even" | James S.A. Corey | ||
| ebe4607 | Aw, you goddammed bastards! They're shootin' him while he's down! Son of a bitch!" The ship stopped moving, and Alex said in a quiet voice, "Suck on this, asshole." The ship vibrated for half a second, then paused before continuing toward the lock. "Point defense cannons?" Holden asked. "Summary roadside justice," Alex grunted back." | space-combat retribution military | James S.A. Corey | |
| 93c8f2d | Intellectually, he knew he wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice himself or his happiness to save everyone else. But that didn't stop the tiny voice at the back of his head that said, Fuck everyone else, I want my girlfriend back. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 1a5fe31 | Could we please not assault the patient with the crushed spinal cord," she said as she did, "because this makes me very uncomfortable." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 3a1e146 | Holden shot him in the throat. Somewhere in his brain stem, Detective Miller nodded in approval. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| dd87f20 | He'd read accounts of extravehicular euphoria, but the experience was unlike anything he'd imagined. He was the eye of God, drinking in the light of infinite stars, and he was a speck of dust on a speck of dust, clipped by his mag boots to the body of a ship unthinkably more powerful than himself, and unimportant before the face of the abyss. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| eaab746 | A guy I once knew tried to justify his life choices to me by comparing himself to Genghis Khan." "I take it you didn't find his argument compelling?" Murtry asked with a smirk. "No," Holden said. "And then a friend of mine shot him in the face." "An ironic rebuttal to an argument about necessary violence." "I thought so too, at the time." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 829f0d3 | He felt the decision like a seed crystal giving form to the chaos around it, solid, hard, resolute. Desperation, mourning, and a million farewells, one to the other. The word quarantine came to him, and with the logic of dreams, it carried an unsupportable weight of horror. But within it, like the last voice in Pandora's box, the promise of reunion. One day, when the solution was found, everything that had been lost would be regained. The g.. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| d131240 | The concrete replaces the forest. You get in its way, you get paved over. If you can find a way to live in the cracks, you can thrive anywhere. There were always cracks. | forest | James S.A. Corey | |
| bf59566 | She preferred the times when she could pretend that she was in a gravity well to the little reminders that she was the puppet of acceleration and inertia. | gravity-well spaceships inertia space-travel gravity | James S.A. Corey | |
| 29e603b | The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round. | morality missile realist morals | James S.A. Corey | |
| 17a054a | Too many people with too many agendas, and everyone was worried that the other guy would shoot them in the back. Of all the ways to go and meet the God-like alien whatever-they-were that built the protomolecule, this was the stupidest, the most dangerous, and--for Bull's money--the most human. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| dc50762 | So are you conscious?" The alien robot--the skin the Miller construct was using--shrugged. It was strange how well the gesture translated. "Don't know. Seems like I'm acing my Turing test, though." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| a55d4c9 | Alex said. "This is Medina Station under occupation by a bunch of splinter Martian military expats. It's not Baltimore." Amos' smile was as placid as always. "Everywhere's Baltimore." | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 69b33f4 | Trashy people puke," Tilly said. "Ladies are unwell." | puke trashy unwell vomit | James S.A. Corey | |
| 13aa3ee | The same beautiful bullshit that everyone told themselves. That they were special. That they mattered. That some vast intelligence behind the curtains of reality cared what happened to them. And in all the history of the species, they'd all died anyway. "Attention," | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 0fb3fba | It's all fun and games till someone shoots back, Holden thought. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| c0964de | Yeah," Chris said. "I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero." | humor sarcasm | James S.A. Corey | |
| 7b5ddd5 | Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 6025bd2 | All beautiful things should have just a little sorrow about them. Made them seem real. | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 5b1db67 | During his time as a graduate student, he had done data collection for a study of Pinus contorata. Of all the varieties of pine to rise off Earth, lodgepole pine had been the most robust in low-g environments. His job had been to collect the fallen cones and burn them for the seeds. In the wild, lodgepole pine wouldn't germinate without fire; the resin in the cones encouraged a hotter fire, even when it meant the death of the parental tree... | James S.A. Corey | ||
| 103b18e | Choosing to stand by while people kill each other is also an action, | James S.A. Corey |