Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWork finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We 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.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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There 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.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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