In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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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 activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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