Authors:

Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 13

All Quotes Achievement Age Ambition Anxiety Art Atheist Awareness Belief Bitterness Blame Challenges Children Choices Curiosity Desire Destiny Difficulty Dignity Envy Expectations Falling In Love Feelings Frustration Giving Giving Up God Gratitude Happiness Hate Heart Home Identity Inspiration Journey Joy Literature Losing Love Lying Memories Motivation Optimism Pain Painting Personality Perspective Philosophy Proust Purpose Quality Reality Sadness Soul Suffering Travel Understanding Weakness Worry Writing
Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Alain de Botton
High Standards, Standards, Idealist
Twitter post from Mar 14, 2015

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Alain de Botton
Mean, Media

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

Alain de Botton
Revenge, Victory, Way

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

Alain de Botton
Religious, Atheist, Journey

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

Alain de Botton
Thinking

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

Alain de Botton
Moving, Eye, Reflection
Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.32, Penguin UK

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
Atheist, People, Priorities

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

Alain de Botton
Book, Done, Remains

to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap

Alain de Botton
Believe, Mean, Light
Alain de Botton (2007). “The Architecture of Happiness”, p.121, Penguin UK

When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Alain de Botton
World, Proust, Scene
Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.164, Pan Macmillan

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

Alain de Botton
Children, Father, Grew Up

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

Alain de Botton
Emotional, Luxury, Self
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.82, Vintage

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Alain de Botton
Destiny, Stronger, Longing
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.10, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

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

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.

Alain de Botton
Numbness, Identity, World
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

Alain de Botton
Art, Imagination, World
Alain de Botton (2003). “The Art of Travel”, p.13, Penguin UK

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

Alain de Botton
Jobs, Children, Self
"In defence of self-help books" by Alain de Botton, www.theguardian.com. May 17, 2012.

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

Alain de Botton
People, Generosity, Envy

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

Alain de Botton
Art, Feelings, Might

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

Alain de Botton
Distance, Curiosity, Might

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

Alain de Botton
Baby, Disappointment, Children

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

Alain de Botton
Lying, Heart, Pride
Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.42, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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
God, Spiritual, Religious

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

Alain de Botton
Summer, Berries, Might
Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.27, Penguin UK

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
Jobs, Sunday, Personality

You May Also Like: