We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTo be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
ALAIN DE BOTTONInsomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAn argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
ALAIN DE BOTTONNot everyone is worth listening to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAnyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArt cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
ALAIN DE BOTTON