Alain De Botton Quotes - Page 2

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

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.

The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

...Because beauty is typically the result of a few qualities working in concert, it can take more to guarantee the appeal of a bridge or a house than strength alone. (p 205)

Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent

We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.

Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.