Frases de Alain de Botton

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“Talvez seja verdade que nós não existimos realmente até que alguém note a nossa existência, que não dizemos nada até que alguém possa entender a essência daquilo que estamos dizendo, e que só estamos completamente vivos até sermos amados.”

“Não existe essa coisa de equilíbrio entre vida e trabalho. Tudo que vale a pena lutar desequilibra sua vida.”

“Ama seus filhos e eles serão capazes de superar você. Ignorar seus filhos e eles vão ser obcecados por você por toda a vida.”

“O momento em que choramos num filme não é aquele em que as coisas são tristes mas quando se tornam mais bonitas que aquilo que esperávamos que viessem a ser.”

“A nossa maior prova de lealdade para com outra pessoa é a nossa monstruosa deslealdade com todos os outros.”

“É um sinal de que duas pessoas tenham parado de amar uma a outra (ou pelo menos parado de desejar fazer o esforço que constitui noventa por cento do amor)quando não são mais capazes de transformar diferenças em piadas.”

“Talvez as pessoas mais fáceis de se apaixonar são aqueles sobre os quais não sabemos nada.”

“As pessoas nunca são totalmente boas ou más, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.”

“Trancados em nossos casulos privados, a mídia passou a ser a principal maneira de imaginar como são as outras pessoas, e, como consequência, esperamos que todos os estranhos sejam assassinos, golpistas ou pedófilos -o que reforça o impulso de confiar apenas nos poucos indivíduos que já foram selecionados por redes familiares e de classe.”

“Não era mais a sua ausência que me feria, mas minha crescente indiferença a isso.”

“Raramente nos apaixonamos sem nos sentirmos tão atraídos por aquilo que é objectivamente saudável no ser amado como por aquilo que é interessantemente errado nele.”

“Tendemos a nos apegar a uma noção fixa das emoções, como se existisse uma linha entre amar e não amar que pudesse ser cruzada somente duas vezes, no início e no fim de um relacionamento, em vez de transposta minuto a minuto.”

“Há um anseio por uma retorno ao tempo em que não precisávamos fazer escolhas, livres do remorso pela inevitável perda que toda escolha (no entanto maravilhosa) acarreta.”

“Escrever um livro tem a mesma dose de ansiedade que contar uma anedota e ter que esperar vários anos para saber se teve ou não piada.”

“Nunca é tarde para aprender algumas coisas básicas e embaraçosamente óbvias sobre si mesmo.”

“Nós somos mais inteligentes que aquilo que supomos, e ainda assim a consciência da insanidade do amor nunca salvou ninguém da doença.”

“Existe uma grande ânsia de retorno a um tempo em que não são necessárias escolhas, livre de remorsos da inevitável perda que todas as escolhas (embora maravilhosas) possam implicar.”

“O que nós procuramos, ao nível mais profundo, é assemelhar interiormente, mais do que possuir fisicamente, os objectos e lugares que nos tocam através da sua beleza.”

“Nós nos sentimos culpados por tudo o que ainda não lemos, mas deixamos de notar que já lemos muito mais que Agostinho ou Dante, ignorando desse modo, que o problema está sem dúvida em nossa maneira de assimilar, não na extensão de nosso consumo.”

“As religiões (…) sabem que a existência de uma plateia ajuda a sustentar a bondade. (…) Por mais sinistra que a ideia de semelhante vigilância pareça a princípio, na realidade pode ser tranquilizador viver como se alguém estivesse o tempo todo observando e esperando o melhor de nós.”

“O que é a experiência? Algo que quebra uma rotina educada e por um breve período nos permite testemunhar coisas com a sensibilidade aumentada que nos concede a novidade, o perigo, ou a beleza. As amizades nutridas somente por jantares ocasionais jamais terão a profundidade daquelas formadas numa viagem ou numa universidade.”

“Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?”

“In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty. He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, ‘see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web.”

“Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.”

“The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.”

“The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.”

“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 he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.””

“Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.”

“Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.”

“An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.”

“Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.”

“Life is near-death experience.”

“Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.”

“Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.”

“I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.”

“The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorized that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. … But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask … how meaningful the lives might feel as a result.”

“It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.”

“Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.”

“True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

“I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.”

“These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.”

“We should not be frightened by appearances.”

“Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.”

“The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although—to the more imaginative at least—a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.”

“For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.”

“Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”