Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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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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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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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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