Alain De Botton Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Alain De Botton
Alain De Botton Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Alain De Botton on Wise Famous Quotes.
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
Page 25 "But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up.
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
Writing isn't a career choice. It's self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
In hock to the excitements and commercial advantages of rage, the news cruelly ignores the project of consolation.
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved
It follows that the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy.
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers ... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness ...
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired,
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine.
Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos.
Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
There are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.