A Quote by Alain de Botton

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
For me, when I go to bed at night, I am happy that I haven't hurt someone. And if I think I have, I will rectify it. I now refuse to give someone permission to make me feel bad about myself. They can't make me feel bad about myself if I don't allow it.
Ace of Spades says that this became clear to him in a revelation one night. He was watching Chris Matthews interview [Barack] Obama, and he didn't get one question! He didn't ask Obama one question about how Obamacare works. Every question was one degree or another: How do you feel about [John] Boehner opposing it? How do you feel about it? What will make you happy? Do you think you can get it? [It] was irrelevant!
I allowed social media to define what I thought of my body. And now I realize that no matter how thin you are, someone will call you fat. No matter how beautiful you are, someone will call you ugly. But you can't spend your time worrying about that. You're just not going to please the world.
I want people to ask me how I feel about the world, or what is my day about, and ask me a question that's not just related to food, but that's related to me being a person: Someone that's vulnerable, someone that has ideas and someone that wants to learn more.
Lean into your curiosity about any issue, and there will likely be people to share a little bit more of their knowledge and insight and give you ideas on how to make change.
But there is no sole person for another's heart. Souls cannot be broken and then completed by another. That's not healthy, nor wise. There are infinite possibilities as there are infinite people and some matches are better than others...Just don't say that you'll die without the other one or that you'll never love again or that you're not whole-That's the stuff of Romeo and Juliet, hasty nonsense, and you know how well that turned out...Just don't be desperate about it. That's where souls go wrong, when they think they don't have choices. The heart must make choices.
Someone asked me about the difference between love and lust. Hmmm. That will take a little thought. How to tell the difference? Well, for guys, if she looks better AFTER you've made love to her than before, that might be love. If you find yourself itching to get out the door afterward, probably just lust, y'know?
Someone killed my Mother and my Father and my Sister?" "Yes, someone did." "A Man?" "A Man." "Which means," said Bod, "you're asking the wrong question." Silas raised an eyebrow. "How so?" "Well," said Bod. "If I go outside in the world, the question isn't who will keep me safe from him?" "No?" "No. It's who will keep him safe from me?
Befriending life is less a matter of knowledge than a question of wisdom. It is not about mastering life, controlling it or exerting our will over it, no matter how well intentioned our will may be. Befriending life is more about harmlessness than it is about control.
Success is not about having a lot but about making the most of what you have. But success alone however will not necessarily make you fulfilled or happy. It is how you share your achievements with others to make their lives better that will. This is called greatness. It is about living life with a purpose beyond self and family.
Everybody always asks me about carries, what I thought about it, how I felt, but when you got teammates like that who love you and care for you, it don't matter how you feel or how bad it hurts, you've got to make sure you're making those guys happy by helping them win, getting a victory.
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That's when I will be truly dead - when I exist in no one's memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies,too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
Some individuals are better able than others to draw the right conclusions about the world about them and act accordingly. These individuals will be more likely to survive and reproduce so their pattern of behaviour and thought will become dominant
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.
Sometimes we make the process more complicated than we need to. We will never make a journey of a thousand miles by fretting about how long it will take or how hard it will be. We make the journey by taking each day step by step and then repeating it again and again until we reach our destination.
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