The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTON