Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMaturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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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.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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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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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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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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