Alain de Botton quotes - page 3

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control. (Alain de Botton)
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
Alain de Botton
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
Alain de Botton
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Alain de Botton
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly. (Alain de Botton)
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Alain de Botton
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
Alain de Botton
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
Alain de Botton
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. (Alain de Botton)
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Alain de Botton
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton