Alain de Botton no Twitter | Pare tudo #3

Conheci o trabalho do Alain de Botton pirando no seu primeiro livro Ensaios de amor e desde então o acompanho com inveja, especialmente depois de ler Religião para ateus, ouvi-lo de perto em 2011 na Sala São Paulo no “Fronteiras do pensamento” e ver o crescimento da The School of Life.

No Twitter é talvez um dos melhores perfis. Eu, que já não leio timeline alguma, entro direto na página dele de vez em quando pra ler tudo numa só cacetada, igual faço com o perfil do Eduardo Pinheiro no Facebook. Sempre compensa. Hoje me empolguei e reuni algumas frases e aforismos recentes (considerando apenas 2013) para compartilhar com vocês.

Sobre trabalho e ação no mundo

Com as quais me identifico especialmente no momento atual de criação disso que estamos chamando de O LUGAR.

“To develop, keeping making room for ideas, people, experiences you don’t yet know what to do with. Honour the random.”
“The trick: to pursue big unconventional plans and ambitions — without going mad.”
“Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.”

Sobre desenvolvimento humano

Aqui um Alain de Botton budistinha:

“We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness…”
“The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”
“With many problems, the best you can do is move from feeling individually persecuted to (via art/conversation) collectively sad.”
“When trying to decode the ‘weird’ behaviour of others, think of the most basic emotions: Fear, Envy, Guilt…”
“Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”
“In an ideal secular religion, there’d be a specially solemn prayer for: ‘those who have gone into television’.”
“Appreciation of life’s smaller moments tends to begin when one realises the whole thing can never be made perfect.”
“It isn’t enough that an idea simply be reasonable: to be truly effective, it also needs to be constantly repeated.”
“Humanity isn’t short of wisdom, the issue is how to embed it as a practice in daily life.”

Sobre relações

“Great conversations are like beautiful squares in foreign cities one finds at night and then don’t know how to get back to in daytime.”
“In love, rather than being idealised as perfect, it seems better to be recognised as deeply flawed — but treated hopefully.”
“The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.”
“Far from feeling guilt, people who have hurt us typically start to hate us for standing as a reminder of their misdeeds.”
“The most romantic gift: to listen to another’s anxieties for 1 hr, without judgement or ‘solutions’, as an analyst might.”

Sobre educação e fama

“A proof of good parenting? That the child has no aspiration to be famous.”
“The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.”

(Não me atrevi a traduzir porque muito se perderia, já que o Alain de Botton tem uma abordagem bem literária.) Tá pra nascer outro filósofo tão interessado, aberto, próximo, jovem. Se ainda não o segue, pare tudo…