What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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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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