Sea > Sea's Quotes

“The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”
― Alain de Botton

“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”
― Alain de Botton

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”
― Alain de Botton

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”
― Alain de Botton

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.”
― Alain de Botton

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”
― Alain de Botton

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”
― Alain de Botton

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
― Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

“If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders.”
― Andrew Harvey

“Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths”
― Andrew Harvey, The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journey to the Divine Using the World's Spiritual Traditions

“To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment.”
― Andrew Harvey

“I pray for the gift of silence, Of emptiness and solitude, Where everything I touch is turned into prayer:”
― Andrew Harvey, Light the Flame: 365 Days of Prayer

“You will be graced by the necessary catastrophes.”
― Andrew Harvey, The Direct Path: Creating a Personal Journey to the Divine Using the World's Spiritual Traditions

“To be human is to be born into a dance in which every animate or inanimate, visible or invisible being is also dancing. Every step of this dance is printed in light; its energy is adoration, its rhythm is praise. Pain, desolution, and destruction in this full and unified sacred vision are not separate from the dance, but are instead essential energies of its transformative unfolding. Death itself cannot shatter the dance, because death is the lifespring of its fertility, the mother of all its changing splendor. If we could bring ourselves to open to this vision, we would undergo a revolution of the heart.”
― Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother

“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena