Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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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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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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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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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
ALAIN DE BOTTON