The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArt 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
-
-
The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
When 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
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?
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
ALAIN DE BOTTON