The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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