If 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 BOTTONRage 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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What 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.
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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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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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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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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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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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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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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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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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