The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOnly as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDiffer though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPolitics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBooksellers 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 BOTTONReputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIf we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON