It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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