Neel Burton Quotes

#1. There are essentially three types of people: those who love life more than they fear it, those who fear life more than they love it, and those who have no clue what I'm talking about.

Neel Burton

#2. The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.

Neel Burton

#3. Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.

Neel Burton

#4. It is no coincidence that, on all four sides, in all four corners, the borders of the Roman Empire stopped where wine could no longer be made.

Neel Burton

#5. Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.

Neel Burton

#6. The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.

Neel Burton

#7. Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

Neel Burton

#8. Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.

Neel Burton

#9. Philosophy gives life to life.

Neel Burton

#10. It takes ten good decisions to make up for one disastrous one. This is why it is better not to make nine good decisions than to make one bad one - which is what happens most of the time.

Neel Burton

#11. Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.

Neel Burton

#12. A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.

Neel Burton

#13. Wine is a story that gives birth to stories, and man, a story-telling animal.

Neel Burton

#14. One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.

Neel Burton

#15. When a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce ... in the same individual, we have the best possible condition for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries.

Neel Burton

#16. True friends seek together to live truer, fuller lives by relating to each other authentically and by teaching each other about the limitations of their beliefs and the defects in their character, which are a far greater source of error than mere rational confusion.

Neel Burton

#17. Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.

Neel Burton

#18. The two greatest warriors are Truth and Time. Be sure to march behind, and not against, them.

Neel Burton

#19. The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.

Neel Burton

#20. Philosophy is an act of seduction between one true lover and another, most often the philosopher and himself.

Neel Burton

#21. In philosophy, phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Wine blind tasting is the best phenomenology, phenomenology par excellence, returning us from our heads into the world, and, at the same time, teaching us the methods of the mind.

Neel Burton

#22. Relative poverty is when you have more taste than money.

Neel Burton

#23. Man first creates the universe in his image, and then turns round to say that God created man in his image ... As Voltaire quipped, if God created man in his image, man has returned the compliment.

Neel Burton

#24. If you say it very softly, with a smile, you can get away with saying almost anything, even the truth.

Neel Burton

#25. When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive.

Neel Burton

#26. Drinking turns a fool into a merry fool.

Neel Burton

#27. Love is like chickenpox. It's much worse when it comes late.

Neel Burton

#28. No one ever pays to learn the most important things.

Neel Burton

#29. Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.

Neel Burton

#30. A man shrinks or expands into the degree and nature of his ambition. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

Neel Burton

#31. As so often in life, it is not a case of true and false, but of true and more true.

Neel Burton

#32. For all this, man is embodied and trusting in his senses; he had sooner believe in a sensible improbability than in an insensible uncertainty, that is, sooner worship an idol than grapple with the philosophers.

Neel Burton

#33. If you paint the world in black and white you lose its colour.

Neel Burton

#34. Our life is just as long or short as our memory, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.

Neel Burton

#35. I've come to realise that the most precious commodity in life is not money, time, or even health as such, but mental energy. We should take great care in nurturing, protecting, and directing our mental energies.

Neel Burton

#36. the best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired,

Neel Burton

#37. Madness is like wine: small amounts are inspiring, but too much can make you ill.

Neel Burton

#38. I can't believe I spent 13 years at school and never got taught cooking, gardening, conversation, massage, Latin, or philosophy. What were they thinking? That I would somehow live off inorganic chemistry?

Neel Burton

#39. Gratitude promotes consciousness, enthusiasm, joy, empathy, and tranquillity, while protecting from anxiety, sadness, loneliness, regret, and envy, with which it is fundamentally incompatible.

Neel Burton

#40. An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.

Neel Burton

#41. Wine is one of the most complex of all beverages: the fruit of a soil, climate, and vintage, digested by a fungus through a process guided by the culture, vision, and skill of an individual man or woman.

Neel Burton

#42. Maths is at only one remove from magic.

Neel Burton

#43. Xenophobia is when you smile at people and they don't smile back.

Neel Burton

#44. The very purpose of an ego defence such as reification (or indeed any ego defence) is, as the name implies, to protect and uphold a certain crystallized notion of self or 'I'. There is therefore an important sense in which the reifying self is itself reified.

Neel Burton

#45. Anxiety, says Kierkegaard, is the dizziness of freedom.

Neel Burton

#46. My basic political principle: If something, whether right- or left-wing, is driven by love and solidarity, it is right; if it is driven by hate and fear it is wrong. Simple as that.

Neel Burton

#47. A genius is no more - and no less - than someone who insists on the truth, while others face the other way.

Neel Burton

#48. Although selfhood depends causally upon the existence of the brain, it amounts to something far more than the brain. This something is vague and intangible, and might best be described, I think, as a semi-fictional narrative that is in constant need of writing, editing, and preserving.

Neel Burton

#49. Man cannot bear to be in the wrong. As soon as he feels guilt or remorse, he bends his ethics to suit himself. Actions do not flow from ethics, but ethics from actions, and it is by refining our actions that we refine our ethics.

Neel Burton

#50. According to Aristotle, envy is pain for the presence of good things in others, whereas emulation is pain for their absence in us. This is a subtle but critical difference. Unlike envy, which is self-defeating, emulation is a good thing because it makes us take steps towards securing good things.

Neel Burton

#51. Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.

Neel Burton