Cata Winitzky > Cata's Quotes

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”
― Alain De Botton, On Love

“We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other.”
― Alain de Botton, Essays In Love

“Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

“The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Furthermore, what fundamentally distinguishes adulthood from childhood is that the adult has access to a great many more sources of hope than the child.”
― The School of Life, On Confidence

“Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”
― Phil Knight, Shoe Dog

“I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.”
― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“But simplicity is really an achievement – it follows from hard-won clarity about what matters.”
― The School of Life, Great Thinkers: Simple Tools from 60 Great Thinkers to Improve Your Life Today

“It makes no sense, and is a form of twisted narcissism, to imagine that our era has any kind of monopoly on idiocy and disaster.”
― The School of Life, What is Culture For?

“Art can do the opposite of glamorising the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.”
― The School of Life, What is Culture For?

“Advertising is far more than just a communications industry. It's a problem-solving industry that also teaches you about life, how it encourages you to focus your thinking and produce something of genuine value. Why? Because that will make the advertising task so much easier. You're not equipped with a unique set of insights and experiences across a broad range of markets, allowing you to bring clarity and inspiration to anything you wish to produce.”
― John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising

“Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“Days later, when it was confirmed that I was not pregnant, I evolved a new understanding of the word "whore," one that was less about actions and more about essence. It was not that I had done something wrong, so much as that I existed in the wrong way. There was something impure in the fact of my being.

It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. But Shawn had more power over me than I could possibly have imagined. He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that.”
― Tara Westover, Educated

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you.”
― John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising

“Love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy. Our need for togetherness exists alongside our need for separateness.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity. At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“We no longer plow the land together; today we talk. We have come to glorify verbal communication. I speak; therefore I am. We naively believe that the essence of who we are is most accurately conveyed through words.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

“Love is an exercise in selective perception”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic

“It takes two people to create a pattern, but only one to change it.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

“Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.”
― Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas. It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They're valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

“We don't need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.”
― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking