Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOnly as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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 BOTTONWe need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSocrates, 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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWork is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAfter 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAn argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
ALAIN DE BOTTON