Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTONUnnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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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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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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