Yolanda Martinez > Yolanda's Quotes

“Our corporate executives speculate with their shareholders’ assets because they get big personal rewards when they win—and even if they lose, they are often bailed out with public funds by obedient politicians. We privatize profit and socialize risk. The”
― Edward O. Thorp, A Man for All Markets: Beating the Odds, from Las Vegas to Wall Street

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
― Alain de Botton

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”
― 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

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“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

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

“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”
― alain de botton

“...love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.”
― Alain de Botton

“Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.”
― 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

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

“Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom
we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during
long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is
gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the
beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation
about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or
blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“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

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”
― Alain de Botton

“Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.”
― Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.”
― Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”
― Alain de Botton, On Love

“The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.”
― Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.


Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.”
― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“God is a verb”
― Buckminster Fuller

“Integrity is the essence of everything successful.”
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

“Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
― R. Buckminster Fuller

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind