Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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The 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.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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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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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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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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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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We 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.
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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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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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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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Man 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.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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