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 BOTTONPerhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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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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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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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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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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