Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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