Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDon’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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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 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.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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