What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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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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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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 largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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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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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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