The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONYet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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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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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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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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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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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on 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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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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