I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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 BOTTONMust being in love always mean being in pain?
ALAIN DE BOTTONI think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTONGood books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONFeeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWriting isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
ALAIN DE BOTTONHappiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
ALAIN DE BOTTONRage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBooksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
ALAIN DE BOTTON