12 Posts found for Author: Alain de Botton

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate… It refuses to let … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature… [It] can quieten its own buzzing preoccupations in order, at times, to focus on the world beyond itself.

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of maneuvers that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose… A healthy mind is an editing mind, an organ that manages to sieve, from thousands of stray, dramatic, disconcerting, or horrifying thoughts, those particular ideas and sensations that actively need to be entertained in order for us to direct our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry

Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt – disrupts our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Subjects: Communication, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Relationships

There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

We are as clever with our machines and technologies as we are simple-minded in the management of our emotions. We are, in terms of wisdom, little more advanced than the ancient Sumerians or the Picts. We have the technology of an advanced civilization balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves. We have the appetites and destructive … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Wisdom

The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.

Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

We have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare, unless our defenses have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud, or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Such is our proclivity for error and our vulnerability to reversals of fortune, we are all on the verge of needing someone to come to our imaginative aid. And therefore, if for no other reason, we have a duty to remain constant providers of generous interpretations of the lives of others. We must be kind in the sense not only of being touched by the … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Relationships

Even when they do not know any of the details, generous onlookers must make a stab at picturing the overall structure of what might have happened to the wretched being before them. They must guess that there will be sorrow and regret beneath the furious rantings, or a sense of intolerable vulnerability behind the pomposity and snobbishness. They must intimate that early trauma and let-down … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships