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Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 12

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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.

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.

Alain de Botton
Mind, New Work, Culture

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
Heart, Mediocrity, May
"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

Alain de Botton
Self, Imagination, Identity
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

Alain de Botton
War, Land, Two

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Alain de Botton
Danger, Drawbacks
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.72, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.

Alain de Botton
Mean, Connections, Needs
Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.73, Penguin UK

Symons remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

Alain de Botton
Law, Ideas, Errors
"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

Alain de Botton
Greek, Rewards, Leisure
"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

Alain de Botton
Jobs, Book, Holiday

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

Alain de Botton
Country, Prayer, Airports
Alain de Botton (2010). “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary”, p.22, Profile Books

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Alain de Botton
Beautiful, Mean, Cutting
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

Alain de Botton
Hate, Compassion, Might
Twitter post from Feb 24, 2013

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

Alain de Botton
Moon, Men, Light

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

Alain de Botton
Museums, Secular Society, Ideas

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

Alain de Botton
Glasses, Understanding, Hurtful
Alain De Botton (1997). “How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel”, Pantheon

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

Alain de Botton
Falling In Love, Lying, Believe
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.15, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

Alain de Botton
Atheist, Thinking, Trying

A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

Alain de Botton
Sight, Hints, Throat

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

Alain de Botton
Kindness, Order, Should Have

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

Alain de Botton
Justice, Phrases, Definitions

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

Alain de Botton
Sports, Real, School
"Office affairs" by Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2009.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

Alain de Botton
Home, Self, Important

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

Alain de Botton
Eye, Our World, Would Be
Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.214, Pan Macmillan

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

Alain de Botton
Travel, Journey, Mindset
"The Art of Travel". Book by Alain de Botton, 2002.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Alain de Botton
Men, Dust, Sublime
Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.89, Penguin UK

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