What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTo 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.
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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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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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 finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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