Beate > Beate's Quotes

“To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.”
― Alain De Botton, Status Anxiety

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”
― Alain de Botton

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
― Alain de Botton

“Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.”
― David Pilling, The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations

“If you’re still in it, it’s hard to talk about it. I wasn’t able to attach in the way that you need to attach and open up in the way that you need to open up in order to have any type of relationship with a therapist.” This was a stunning revelation: So many patients are in and out of treatment, unable to meaningfully connect because they are still “in it.” Of course, when people don’t know who they are, they can’t possibly see the reality of the people around them.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?”
― Derek Sivers, Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

“Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you're being the real you and when you're trying to impress an invisible jury.”
― Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

“When I’m with friends now, as an adult, I don’t want to have polite adult tea and talk about our jobs. I don’t want to sit in dress pants while we talk about a New Yorker article. Not really. I want to lie on the couch, cozy in blankets, watching movies, feeling safe enough to pass out and stay the night if we want to. I want to turn English muffins into foundations for pizza bagels at ten p.m., even though they’re not as good as bagels and we know it. I want to tell each other things we can’t talk about online, or we can’t tell our coworkers, and to cry and still be lovable, even if we’re in pain sometimes. To break in front of each other, and pick up the pieces together, before making some dumb joke and telling each other we love each other and knowing we’re safe to be all of it.”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

“I wish I could give you a clean and simple business card explaining what happened so I could be the kind of orphan who would immediately make sense to everyone. Like if my parents had a socially recognizable problem that immediately explained their inability to take care of me and my sister. Something I could put on paper and hand to people as proof. “Here. This is why.”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

“I’ve never had that thing of like “Leave stuff at your parents’ house.” Because the second I left home, I gave away or threw away everything and I regret it all the time but I know why I did it. I didn’t know if I was ever coming back or could come back and I didn’t want to leave something and then later need it and have no way to get it back.”
― Lane Moore, How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don't

“It's humbling to recognise just how many great achievements have been the result not of superior talent or technical know-how, but merely of that strange buoyancy of the soul we call confidence. And this sense of confidence is ultimately nothing more than an internalised version of the confidence other people once had in us.”
― The School of Life, A Job to Love

“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“If war is gods way of teaching geography to Americans, then recession is his way of teaching little economics to everyone”
― Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

“But, as Montaigne recognised, other people – even clever ones – will be silent on many important themes that circulate in our minds. If we allow existing thinkers to define the boundaries of our curiosity, we will needlessly hold back the development of our minds.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.”
― The School of Life, How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity

“Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored. Society ends up containing a range of unbalanced groups, each hungering to sate its particular psychological deficiency, forming the backdrop against which our frequently heated conflicts about what is beautiful plays themselves out.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“Empathy has to be forged by personal suffering.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Growing up, I never knew a relaxed woman. Successful women? Yes. Productive women? Plenty. Anxious and afraid and apologetic women? Heaps of them. But relaxed women? At-ease women? Women who don't dissect their days into half hour slots of productivity? Women who prioritize rest and pleasure and play? Women who aren't afraid to take up space in the world? Women who give themselves unconditional permission to relax? Without guilt? Without apology? Without feeling like they need to earn it? I'm not sure I've ever met a woman like that. But I would like to become one.”
― Nicola Jane Hobbs

“Grief is a swallow,' he said. 'One day you wake up and you think it's gone, but it's only migrated to some other place, warming its feathers. Sooner or later, it will return and perch in your heart again.”
― Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World

“Maybe Mira has no heart. Maybe a heart comes and goes. Maybe her heart is protecting her against pain. Perhaps it will start working later on. Perhaps her heart got tired long ago, and collapsed and was left by the side of the road. Maybe one day it will start to feel again. Maybe it has run out of feelings. Anything can run out of anything. A thought can run out of words.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“At the beginning of time, there was no dust. The flecks of skin from every human who has ever lived have been swept beneath so much furniture, under so many rugs, for millennia upon millennia. And yet the dust goes nowhere! It is all around us. It is hard to imagine how light and free the leaves in the trees once were, and how happy were the birds. We walk through our days in the dust of the dead.”
― Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

“These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
― Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine