A Quote by Alain de Botton

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.
I think a lot of the time, the studio system is so compelled to kowtow to its fear that women are not going to be found sympathetic. It just sort of euthanizes any hope of more diverse examples of the emotional realities of people. Representing my gender, I think, "Well, I have those emotions, why don't those ever get brought to the screen so I can feel recognized?"
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act โ€“ and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment โ€“ are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.
I think I felt very alone for a lot of my life, but once I was able to share my story more and more, and people wouldn't say, 'Hey, I felt sorry for you,' but, 'I get it, and I understand you,' it kind of encouraged me to tell it more. I just don't want people to feel alone.
I think alone time is good to know how to be alone with your own thoughts. I think it just helps you kind of be a better, more grounded person.
To say that a person feels listened to means a lot more than just their ideas get heard. It's a sign of respect. It makes people feel valued.
I've already spent a lot of my life doing what makes me go. There's a life out there while I'm still young, able to move, able to just sit at peace in the water - I should be spending much more time doing that, rather than continuing to go through this artistic struggle.
People generally worry about social networking more than they need to. In kind of consumer internet investing and on social and professional networks, I kind of look at time spending and time efficiency. You know, time saving sites. So on time spending sites, things where you play lots of games or that sort of thing, you might worry about a productivity loss if people are spending a lot of time doing that. So if there's a lot of kind of addictive gaming going on during work hours, that won't be as helpful to you.
When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.
It's a lot of accumulated joy and tension and all kinds of emotions just pouring out of all us. We've all been preparing for this day and we all knew that one day we would just have to move on with our lives and careers even though we all love this show and love working together. But it's still an incredibly emotional time, especially for me with a lot of journalists asking me how it feels about FRIENDS coming to an end. It's started to make me think very deeply about what it's all meant to me and that's made me ever more emotional!
The sexual act - thinking about the sexual act, the telling about the sexual act, after the sexual act, is so much more important than the actual sexual act - just in time. It's like of the whole sexual act, you probably spend 95% of the time thinking about it, talking about it afterwards. The actually sexual act, especially when you're 17, is minutes.
I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can't believe I won't exist. It's the ego isn't it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than this kind of ego-dominated thing. But I don't know, I mean, I want to come back as a tree but I suspect that it's just not going to happen, is it?
I think there are people who think 'high school was the peak of my life,' and there are people who think it was dreadful, and then, I think most people are somewhere in between. I do think that it's normal to experience strong emotions during that time, and I think those emotions stay with you.
Women are really emotional creatures, and men are kind of closed in terms of emotions. I think women are just a lot more out there.
I think some of this just feels right. You're in the shower and you come up with a sentence and it's beautiful. You don't know how it's going to fit in the film, but you put it in because it feels right. This is a very long way of saying, so much of it is me feeling like I'm catching ideas rather than coming up with ideas. It's very fluid like that.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there. So rather than correct the weird ideas, I would rather them to know how to think in the first place. Then they can correct the weird idea themselves.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!