Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONReputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
-
-
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Not everyone is worth listening to.
ALAIN DE BOTTON