I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
ALAIN DE BOTTONGetting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPerhaps 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTONInsomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
ALAIN DE BOTTONFeeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMan seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAnyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPolitics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
ALAIN DE BOTTON