The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMaturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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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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Sweetness 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.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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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