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 BOTTONSo many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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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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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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