Activations Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
"The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
"At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality."
Quote by -Alain de Botton
“I'm in New York, land of the free and home of the brave, but I'm supposed to behave as if I were in Limerick at all times.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they'd be lost forever.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Then he placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last. It’s on my tongue. I draw it back. It stuck. I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice, Don’t let that host touch your teeth for if you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity. I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“I'm sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won't come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“No one is so busy they can't take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don't deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put in this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Saturday night when you have a few shillings in your pocket is the most delicious night of the week.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Clarke, define resplendent. I think it’s shining, sir. Pithy, Clarke, but adequate. McCourt, give us a sentence with pithy. Clarke is pithy but adequate, sir. Adroit, McCourt. You have a mind for the priesthood, my boy, or politics. Think of that.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit far-fetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too far-fetched.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“The boys from Staten Island would fill more body bags than Stuyvesant could ever imagine. Mechanics and plumbers had to fight while college students shook indignant fists, fornicated in the fields of Woodstock and sat in.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“That's what he disliked about certain artists and writers. They interfered and pointed to everything as if you couldn't see it or read for yourself.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“There's something hostile about the way they enter and leave the room that tells you what they think of you. It could be your imagination and you try to figure out what will bring them over to your side. You try lessons that worked with other classes but even that doesn't help and it's because of that chemistry. They know when they have you on the run. They have instincts that detect your frustrations.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“He drinks his stout and laughs that there’s nothing like a great bloody steak of a Friday night and if that’s the worst sin he ever commits he’ll float to heaven body and soul, ha ha ha.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“They said her duck recipe and the Chinese music were so dramatic everything else sounded anemic.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt
“I was sick of my miserable childhood, too, the way it followed me across the Atlantic and kept nagging at me to be made public.”
Quote by -Frank McCourt