Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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