Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWriting isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt 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 BOTTONA danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
ALAIN DE BOTTONHow generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
ALAIN DE BOTTONReputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIf one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
ALAIN DE BOTTONYou need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat 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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
ALAIN DE BOTTONPeople who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
ALAIN DE BOTTON