Alain de Botton Quotes

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

My favorite pastime is staring out the window. When I go on tour, I can spend hours and hours just staring out the window, thinking about nothing. I love all that.

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dosing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to.

If I look confused it is because I am thinking.

Time given to thought is the greatest time saver of all.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window.

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business.

Reflective thinking is like the crock pot of the mind. It encourages your thoughts to simmer until they're done.

You don't hurry a thinker, and you don't talk to him when he's thinking. It's just inconsiderate.

Give me a window and I'll stare out it.

I'm just thinking all the time. There are times when I don't really need to think. You know what I mean? If you think about stuff for five hours, you really only need to do like five minutes and the rest of sort of rehashing it and dramatically going over it.

You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that is, but I shall remember it in a bit." "Perhaps it hasn't one," Alice ventured to remark. "Tut, tut, child!" said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

I'm not sure if I could tell the difference—between just staring into space and thinking. We're usually thinking all the time, aren't we? Not that we live in order to think, but the opposite isn't true either—that we think in order to live. I believe, contrary to Descartes, that we sometimes think in order not to be. Staring into space might unintentionally have the opposite effect.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely.

When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems.

The old grey donkey, Eeyore stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know what he was thinking about.

You spend your time thinking about that and you get lost in reflection.

You should have some time to think and that's very important.

It really don't matter what you're thinking about, as long as you're thinking about something.

He thinkes not well, that thinkes not againe.

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.

Whatever we think about and question a lot becomes questionable.

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you’ve learned about the grand themes of life.

Thinking very often resembles napping, but the intent is different. --Stephanie Plum