(Alain De Botton) Quotes
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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.
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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.
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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.
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.