Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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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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