Top 50 Neel Burton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.”

— Neel Burton

2. “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

3. “Solitude, the joy of being alone, stems from, as well as promotes, a state of maturity and inner richness.”

— Neel Burton

4. “A good cheese, like a good life, is a dance with death.”

— Neel Burton

5. “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

6. “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

7. “The problem with studying is that it gets in the way of education.”

— Neel Burton

8. “Now, it so happens that our culture – or lack of it, for our culture is in a state of flux and crisis – places a high value on materialism, and, by extension, greed. Our culture’s emphasis on greed is such that people have become immune to satisfaction. Having acquired one thing, they are immediately ready to desire the next thing that might suggest itself. Today, the object of desire is no longer satisfaction, but desire itself.”

— Neel Burton

9. “When we imagine an alien planet, we rarely imagine it to be divided into countries – because that would be, you know, backward.”

— Neel Burton

10. “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

11. “Maths is at only one remove from magic.”

— Neel Burton

12. “When we stop noticing small things, we are no longer truly alive.”

— Neel Burton

13. “And so, the best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired; and if I could, I would rather inspire a single person than teach a thousand.”

— Neel Burton

14. “Many things can prolong your life, but only wisdom can save it.”

— Neel Burton

15. “In refining their senses and aesthetic judgement, blind tasters become much more conscious of the richness not only of wine but also of other potentially complex beverages such as tea, coffee, and spirits, and, by extension, the flavours in food, the scents in the air, and the play of light in the world. For life is consciousness, and consciousness is life.”

— Neel Burton

16. “Paradoxically, perhaps, the better company you are, the less company you need.”

— Neel Burton

17. “Teaching is very much like pruning: you need to know when and where and how to make the cuts, and, of course, why.”

— Neel Burton

18. “If you want to be heard, become a dentist.”

— Neel Burton

19. “Many people are unable to let their minds wander off the beaten path for fear of the monsters that may be lurking in the undergrowth. If you meet a monster, take the chance to say ‘hello’.”

— Neel Burton

20. “Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.”

— Neel Burton

21. “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

22. “Of all funny things, truth is the funniest.”

— Neel Burton

23. “Loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of objective meaning from the universe.”

— Neel Burton

24. “An artist is someone who, needing nothing and no one, wants everything and everyone.”

— Neel Burton

25. “As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.”

— Neel Burton

26. “The highest purpose of education is to unlearn what we once took for granted, to replace certainty with subtlety, prejudice with compassion, and destiny with possibility.”

— Neel Burton

27. “Love, like madness, can only fill the models that society makes available.”

— Neel Burton

28. “Our life is just as long or short as our remembering: as rich as our imagining, as vibrant as our feeling, and as profound as our thinking.”

— Neel Burton

29. “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

30. “Life is like a garden: it gives you a few things, and you make of them what you can.”

— Neel Burton

31. “It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that comes to an end.”

— Neel Burton

32. “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

33. “Man is mostly a collection of emotions, most of which he would do better not to be feeling.”

— Neel Burton

34. “There are many ways of being clever, but only one way of being wise.”

— Neel Burton

35. “No one ever pays to learn the most important things.”

— Neel Burton

36. “Rather than being medicalized or romanticized, mental disorders, or mental dis-eases, should be understood as nothing less or more than what they are, an expression of our deepest human nature. By recognizing their traits in ourselves and reflecting upon them, we may be able both to contain them and to put them to good use. This is, no doubt, the highest form of genius.”

— Neel Burton

37. “Xenophobia is when you smile at people and they don’t smile back.”

— Neel Burton

38. “Evil is stupidity with intent.”

— Neel Burton

39. “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

40. “If reasoning is a set of deductions, then tact consists in omitting the workings.”

— Neel Burton

41. “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

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

— Neel Burton

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Poor feeling hijacks thinking for self-deception: to hide harsh truths, avoid action, evade responsibility, and, as the existentialists might put it, flee from freedom. Thus, poor feeling is a kind of moral failing, indeed, the deepest kind, and virtue principally consists in correcting and refining our emotions and the values that they reflect. To feel the right thing is to do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.”

— Neel Burton

46. “The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.”

— 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. “Offence exists not in the insult or the insulter but in our reaction to them, and our reactions are completely within our control. It is unreasonable to expect a boor to be anything but a boor; if we take offence at his bad behaviour, we have only ourselves to blame.”

— Neel Burton

49. “The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.”

— Neel Burton

50. “The three most powerful seasonings are hunger, variety, and gratitude.”

— Neel Burton