Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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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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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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