What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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The 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.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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