It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
ALAIN DE BOTTONJourneys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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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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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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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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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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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 good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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