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"Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs."
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"Stolen moments create a feeling of enjoyment in our "intensive time awareness. The glow and the intensity of those instants can guide us throughout a whole lifetime. They can expose a second or a third dimension of the daily events and shed an expounding light on all the little details we encounter. ['Stolen moments']"
"When you hold the hand of a child, invest one hundred percent of yourself in the act of holding her hand. When you hug your partner, do the same. Forget everything else. Be totally present, totally alive in the act of hugging. This is the opposite of the way we've been trained to lead our lives and run our businesses. We've been taught to do many things at once. We answer an e-mail while we talk on the phone; while in a meeting for one project, we work on our notes for another project. Every new technology promises to help us do more things at once. Now we can send e-mail while listening to music, talking on the phone, and taking a picture, all with the same device. With your energy that dispersed, where is your power?"
"Freedom from the thinking mind is our underlying goal for most of human activity."
"I have no time to look back. My heart is dancing in the present moment feeling the joy of life."
"Be captivated by your hearts desire, not distracted by your minds fear."
"Movement is the freedom of the body; stillness, of the mind."
"The road to happiness starts with a deep breath and an awareness of the many blessings tied to that single breath."
"Mindfulness is that space where you are in touch with life-experience and you are brightly aware."
"To take hold of your mind, you must practice mindfulness of the mind. You must know how to observe and recognize the presence of every feeling and thought which arises in you."
"Be control of your mind."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment."
"There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise."
"The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among."
"The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil."
"A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to."
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
"Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see."
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness."
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