What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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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.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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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.
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After 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.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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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.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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The 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.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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