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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
-
-
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
ALAIN DE BOTTON