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 BOTTONThe problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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.
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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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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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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.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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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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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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