Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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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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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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