It 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 largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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