Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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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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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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