Alain de Botton famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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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 -
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
-- Alain de Botton -
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.
-- Alain de Botton -
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
-- 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.
-- Alain de Botton -
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
-- Alain de Botton -
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
-- Alain de Botton -
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
-- Alain de Botton -
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
-- Alain de Botton -
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
-- Alain de Botton -
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
-- Alain de Botton -
Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
-- Alain de Botton -
Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
-- Alain de Botton -
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
-- Alain de Botton -
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
-- Alain de Botton -
Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
-- Alain de Botton -
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
-- Alain de Botton -
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
-- Alain de Botton -
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.
-- Alain de Botton -
It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
-- Alain de Botton -
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.
-- Alain de Botton -
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
-- Alain de Botton -
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
-- Alain de Botton -
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
-- Alain de Botton -
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
-- Alain de Botton -
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
-- Alain de Botton -
The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
-- 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 -
When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
-- Alain de Botton -
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
-- Alain de Botton -
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
-- Alain de Botton -
No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.
-- 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 -
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
-- Alain de Botton -
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
-- Alain de Botton -
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
-- Alain de Botton -
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
-- Alain de Botton -
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
-- Alain de Botton -
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
-- Alain de Botton -
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
-- Alain de Botton -
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
-- Alain de Botton -
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We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?
-- 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.
-- Alain de Botton -
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
-- Alain de Botton -
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
-- Alain de Botton -
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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.
-- Alain de Botton -
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
-- 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 -
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 -
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
-- Alain de Botton -
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
-- 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.
-- Alain de Botton -
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.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
-- Alain de Botton -
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
-- Alain de Botton -
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.
-- Alain de Botton -
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
-- Alain de Botton -
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
-- Alain de Botton -
Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
-- Alain de Botton -
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
-- Alain de Botton -
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
-- Alain de Botton -
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
-- Alain de Botton -
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
-- Alain de Botton -
Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
-- Alain de Botton -
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
-- Alain de Botton -
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
-- Alain de Botton -
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
-- Alain de Botton -
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.
-- Alain de Botton -
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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.
-- Alain de Botton -
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
-- Alain de Botton -
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
-- Alain de Botton -
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
-- Alain de Botton -
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
-- 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 -
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
-- Alain de Botton -
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To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.
-- 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 -
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
-- Alain de Botton -
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
-- Alain de Botton -
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We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
-- Alain de Botton -
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
-- Alain de Botton -
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
-- Alain de Botton -
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
-- Alain de Botton -
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It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?
-- Alain de Botton -
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
-- Alain de Botton -
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
-- Alain de Botton -
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
-- Alain de Botton -
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
-- Alain de Botton -
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
-- Alain de Botton -
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
-- Alain de Botton -
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
-- Alain de Botton -
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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.
-- Alain de Botton -
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
-- Alain de Botton -
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
-- Alain de Botton -
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...
-- Alain de Botton -
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