Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPhilosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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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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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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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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