The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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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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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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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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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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