My Spare Brain: Alain de Botton

About My Spare Brain

I spend much time searching for things - books, films, stories, quotes, songs, jokes, pictures, poems, prayers, anything really - that helps me see and think differently. Some of the ideas I've come across are presented in my book, See New Now. Others are fleshed out in my other blog. The rest are stored here for use in future books, articles, blog posts, speeches, and workshops. There is little rhyme or reason for what I post here. I do this to encourage visitors to come here as treasure hunters looking for new ways of seeing and thinking vs. researchers looking for new or better answers to questions they already know how to ask.

PLEASE VISIT MY OTHER BLOG

My other blog is Conversation Kindling. Its purpose is to pass along stories, metaphors, quotes, songs, humor, etc. in hopes they'll be used to spark authentic and rewarding conversations about working and living fruitfully. There are at least three things you can gain by getting involved in these conversations. First, you can discover new and important things about yourself through the process of thinking out loud. Second, you can deepen your relationships with others who join you by swapping thoughts, feelings, and stories with them. Finally, you'll learn that robust dialogue centered on stories and experiences is the best way to build trust, create new knowledge, and generate innovative answers to the questions that both life and work ask.

Showing posts with label Alain de Botton. Show all posts

July 20, 2010

ODDS & ENDS: Gifts, Country Music, Language

On Gifts
"Johnny Cash sang like he meant business. He didn't get fancy and he didn't send his voice on missions it could not complete, but there was an urgency in his best songs that pounded them home. When he sang something, it stayed sung." - Roger Ebert

On Country Music
"Country music is three chords and the truth." - Harlan Howard

"Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy." - Dierks Bentley

"There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for 'melancholy of relationships past.' It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgment, to listen to country music." - Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize lecture, December, 1993

"I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means put down." - Bob Newhart

"Country songs have always told the best stories and no one - really, no one - has ever done it better than Nashville. All my life I've admired guitarists like Chet Atkins and Roy Clark who touched me through their sound, but it was those Nashville songwriters who got to me through their words." - B.B. King, blues guitarist and singer-songwriter

On Language
"Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow." - Noam Chomsky

"Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind." - Wade Davis, speaking at The Long Now Foundation

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"Everything that we have so far seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved. Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." – Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"And one thing we have lost – the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship. Oh! you can make words if you enclose them in quotation marks. This indicates that it is dialect and cute." – John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

"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

"Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought." - Karl Kraus

"That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts." - Nietzsche

Johnny Cash, The Man in Black

From Academy of Achievement
Music's Man In Black: An Interview with Johnny Cash

From FORA.tv
A.C. Grayling & Don Watson, It's All Gone to the Dogs - Video

From FORA.tv
Roy Blount Jr., The Sounds, Roots, and History of Words - Video

From YouTube
Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature - Video

June 22, 2010

MASTERMIND: Alain de Botton

"The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread. It has provided psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"In medieval Japan, poets and priests directed the Japanese toward cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things. There was wabi to be enjoyed in an evening spent alone in a cottage in the woods hearing the rain fall." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium. 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." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

"Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not." - Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel

"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too." - Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

"All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"What makes the prospect of death so distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"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

Alain de Botton, Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love

My Spare Brain