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Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 10

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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.

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
Regret, Loss, Choices
Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.112, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

Alain de Botton
Memories, Lying, Leaving
Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.126, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

Alain de Botton
Photography, Anxiety, Losing
Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.114, Penguin UK

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
Believe, Order, Giving
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.196, Vintage

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

Alain de Botton
Writing, Sane
"Office affairs". Interview with Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2009.

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

Alain de Botton
Assessment, Differences, Way

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

Alain de Botton
Ego, Ignored, Ache
Twitter post from Sep 17, 2013

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
Love, Two, People

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

Alain de Botton
Dream, Art, People
"Alain de Botton in quotes: 'The news promotes a toxic society of envy'" by Marta Bausells, www.theguardian.com. August 10, 2014.

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
Good Life, Taken, Ideas

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

Alain de Botton
Believe, Eye, Intelligent

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

Alain de Botton
Spring, Events, Existence
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.

Alain de Botton
Happiness, Quests, Dynamics

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Alain de Botton
Life, Dust, Space

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

Alain de Botton
Falling In Love, Elude Us, Self
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.14, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Alain de Botton
Crowds, Stuff, Newspapers
Twitter post from May 11, 2012

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Alain de Botton
Wisdom, Taken, Acceptance
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.284, Vintage

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

Alain de Botton
Jobs, Work, Not Good Enough

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

Alain de Botton
Pride, Expectations, Achievement

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Alain de Botton
Envy, Groups, Close Friends

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

Alain de Botton
Thinking, Mind, Tasks
Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.32, Penguin UK

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
Ambition, Love Is, Missing
Alain De Botton (2008). “The Art of Travel”, p.88, Vintage

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
Beach, Hate, Silly

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

Alain de Botton
Simple, Thinking, Expression
"Alain de Botton: 'My father was physically quite violent... he would destroy the house'" by Robert Chalmers, www.independent.co.uk. March 25, 2012.

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.

Alain de Botton
Writing, Trying, Attention

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