Alain de Botton quotes - page 5

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed. (Alain de Botton)
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. View quote
Alain de Botton
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to. View quote
Alain de Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. View quote
Alain de Botton
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. View quote
Alain de Botton
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture-and, in the process, we don't allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. View quote
Alain de Botton
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts. View quote
Alain de Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition. View quote
Alain de Botton
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not. View quote
Alain de Botton
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture. View quote
Alain de Botton
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. (Alain de Botton)
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love. View quote
Alain de Botton
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. View quote
Alain de Botton
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect. View quote
Alain de Botton
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them. View quote
Alain de Botton
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others. View quote
Alain de Botton
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call. View quote
Alain de Botton
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope. View quote
Alain de Botton
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass. View quote
Alain de Botton
Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent. View quote
Alain de Botton
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction. (Alain de Botton)
This ideal University of Life ... would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning-not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly "What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings. View quote
Alain de Botton
[These entrepreneurs] were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, ... but by a lack of custom. View quote
Alain de Botton
I wondered aloud to Renae why in our society the greatest sums of money tended to accrue from the sale of the least meaningful things, and why the dramatic improvements in efficiency and productivity at the heart of the Industrial Revolution so seldom extended beyond the provision of commonplace material goods. ... I told Renae that our robots and engines were delivering the lion's share of their benefits at the base of our pyramid of needs, that we were evident experts at swiftly assembling confectionery and yet we were still searching for reliable means of generating emotional stability or marital harmony. View quote
Alain de Botton
The great defect, for Chamfort, consisted in the public's reluctance to submit its thinking to the rigors of rational examination, and its tendency to rely instead on intuition, emotion, and custom. "One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,” the Frenchman observed, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little more than common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: "The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that's the tradition.”. View quote
Alain de Botton