Quotes from Derren Brown

It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.

Each of us is leading a difficult life, and when we meet people we are seeing only a tiny part of the thinnest veneer of their complex, troubled existences. To practise anything other than kindness towards them, to treat them in any way save generously, is to quietly deny their humanity.

Few kids seek to learn a skill specifically designed to impress people unless they feel less than impressive themselves.

we are terrible at reading each other's thoughts. Yet we consistently behave as if we have been endowed with this entirely handsome ability.

learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need.

Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one's life is perhaps the most important part of being human. When we drift into a life without meaning, we soon become a pack of symptoms and pathologies; and without any feeling of significance, many choose to end their lives altogether.

We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.

the mantra of 'you can be anything' creates more pain than pleasure.

If you do grow up feeling as though you don't quite fit in as a child, it's very easy to decide you're certain not going to fit in as an adult. You hang on to your eccentricities and hate the idea of conforming. It's a common pattern.

Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die.

Schopenhauer wrote, 'Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

The science fiction master Arthur C. Clarke gave us the law 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

When others inspire us, they tend to do so through the clear expression of these sketchy, adumbrated thoughts we ourselves have known but never had the perspicacity for formulate with certainty.

1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8

To grow up is to endure the equivocal, to permit the ambiguous.

It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim. Invariably we ignore the regular dice-rolls of chance or random luck; successful high-flyers are typically prone to ignoring the interplay of blind fortune when they credit their career trajectories to their canny business sense or brute self-belief. We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day.

Aristotle also felt strongly that virtue requires action; mere noble intentions are not enough.

There is at the heart of Romanticism an urge to withdraw into oneself in order to then transcend the boundaries of that self and connect with nature and the larger order.

Forget motivation; just get used to doing things straight away.

The kind of self-image we may be best advised to seek, then, is not of ourselves as beautiful winners (as we are often told we should), but one wherein our strengths and weaknesses are realistically appraised with neither self-aggrandisement nor abnegation, and our share of inevitable failings looked upon with kindness and good humour.

You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.

The meaning of life,' wrote Kafka, reputedly, 'is that it stops.

What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.'1 In other words, it is not events out there that cause our problems but rather our reactions to them: the stories we tell ourselves.

As Joseph Campbell wrote about middle age, 'There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you're on the wrong wall.