One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
ALAIN DE BOTTONNot everyone is worth listening to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
ALAIN DE BOTTONReputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDiffer though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
ALAIN DE BOTTONMy writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON