103
" 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 , Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions
106
" 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 , The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting
108
" Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety, and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained, and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they had grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture—and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life—mysterious, magical life—passes them by. "
― Neel Burton
113
" When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love and labour of people who may since have died. The wine is still changing, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incred- ibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God. "
― Neel Burton , The Concise Guide to Wine & Blind Tasting