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.
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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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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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.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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The 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.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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