Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
ALAIN DE BOTTONto design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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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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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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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.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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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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