Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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