Carl Honoré > Quotes

“The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections--with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“The best thing about knitting is its slowness," says Murphy. "It is so slow that we see the beauty inherent in every tiny act that makes up a sweater. So slow that we know the project is not going to get finished today--it may not get finished for many months or longer--and that allows us to make our peace with the unresolved nature of life. We slow down as we knit.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Spending more time with friends and family costs nothing. Nor does walking, cooking, meditating, making love, reading or eating dinner at the table instead of in front of the television. Simply resisting the urge to hurry is free.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Like a bee in a flower bed, the human brain naturally flits from one thought to the next. In the high-speed workplace, where data and headlines come thick and fast, we are all under pressure to think quickly. Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation…Keeping the mind active makes poor use of our most precious resource. True, the brain can work wonders in high gear. But it will do so much more if given the chance to slow down from time to time. Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Speed can give you a great feeling of excitement, and there is a place for that in life and in music," says Kliemt. "But you have to draw the line, and not always use speed. It is stupid to drink a glass of wine quickly. And it is stupid to play Mozart too fast.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Speed can be fun, productive and powerful, and we would be poorer without it. What the world needs, and what the slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes in between.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“In our hedonistic age, the Slow movement has a marketing ace up its sleeve: it peddles pleasure. The central tenet of the Slow philosophy is taking the time to do things properly, and thereby enjoy them more.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Much better to do fewer things and have time to make the most of them.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Slower, it turns out, often means better - better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“This is where our obsession with going fast and saving time leads. To road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“We are slaves to our schedules.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Companies also pay a heavy price for imposing a long-hours culture. Productivity is notoriously hard to measure, but academics agree that overwork eventually hits the bottom line. It is common sense: we are less productive when we are tired, stressed, unhappy or unhealthy. According to the International Labour Organization, workers in Belgium, France and Norway are all more productive per hour than are Americans. The British clock up more time on the job than do most Europeans, and have one of the continent’s poorest rates of hourly productivity to show for it. Working less often means working better.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well. Like many people, I read the paper while watching TV—and find that I get less out of both.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Now is the moment to define our terms. In this book, Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections - with people, culture, work, food, everything.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“The slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail's pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. The movement is made up of people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world. The slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto - the right speed.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“While the rest of the world roars on, a large and growing minority is choosing not to do everything at full-throttle. In every human endeavour you can think of, from sex, work and exercise to food, medicine and urban design, these rebels are doing the unthinkable - they are making room for slowness. And the good news is that decelerating works.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a slow thinker. Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.”
― Carl Honoré

“We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. —FUTURIST MANIFESTO, 1909”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“So many toys—so little unstructured time.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness. Kundera thinks that speed helps us block out the horror and barrenness of the modern world: “Our period is obsessed with the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered, that it is tired of itself, sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“So the Cassandras who warned that the thirty-five-hour week would send the French economy into instant meltdown have been proved wrong. The gross domestic product has grown, and unemployment, though still above the EU average, has fallen. Productivity also remains high. Indeed, some evidence suggests that many French workers are more productive now. With less time on the job, and more leisure to look forward to, they make greater efforts to finish their work before clocking off.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Technology enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet.”
― Carl Honoré

“Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach for the nearest sound bite.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“When it comes to academic life, Lewis favours the same less-is-more approach. Get plenty of rest and relaxation, he says, and be sure to cultivate the art of doing nothing. “Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled,” writes the dean. “It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 × 4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around.” In other words, doing nothing, being Slow, is an essential part of good thinking.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“Ann Landers, the legendary agony aunt, laid out this shift in black and white: ‘At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At age 40, we don’t care what they think of us. At age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.”
― Carl Honoré, Bolder

“The clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible - meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, working shifts.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed

“When people moan, “Oh, I’m so busy, I’m run off my feet, my life is a blur, I haven’t got time for anything,” what they often mean is, “Look at me: I am hugely important, exciting and energetic.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed

“As a culture, we have simply forgotten how to handle risk.”
― Carl Honoré, Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting – Investigative Research on the Slow Parenting Movement and Finding Family Balance

“In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”
― Carl Honoré, In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed