Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
ALAIN DE BOTTONFeeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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 finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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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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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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