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Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 9

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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Alain de Botton
Philosophy, Book, Sound

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Alain de Botton
Anxiety, Might, Expecting
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.44, Vintage

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

Alain de Botton
Book, Writing, Sick

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Alain de Botton
Loss, Frustration, Intellectual

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

Alain de Botton
Valuable, Tedious, Ifs
Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.82, Pan Macmillan

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

Alain de Botton
Love And Friendship, And Love, Debt

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
Annoyed, Anxiety, Political

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

Alain de Botton
Nightmare

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
People, Tasks, Difficult
Twitter post from Jan 04, 2013

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

Alain de Botton
Travel, Giving, Wish

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

Alain de Botton
Home, Self, Encounters

Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?

Alain de Botton
Beautiful, Lying, Believe

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

Alain de Botton
Survival, Safe, Tests
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.87, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Alain de Botton
Art, Suffering, Important

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Alain de Botton
Fate, Thinking, Secular Society

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

Alain de Botton
Thinking, Good Thinking

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

Alain de Botton
Philosophy, Able, Hysterical
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

Alain de Botton
People, Want, Dignity
Twitter post from Feb 13, 2013

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Alain de Botton
Home, Exotic, May
"Toothbrush, bikini... and dead poet" by Philip Marsden, www.theguardian.com. May 19, 2002.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

Alain de Botton
Building Up, Wave, Matchsticks

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

Alain de Botton
Successful, Thinking, People
Twitter post from Jul 08, 2013

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

Alain de Botton
Sleep, Mind, Information
"The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

Alain de Botton
People, Accepting, Offers
1994 The Romanic Movement,'Martyrdom'.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

Alain de Botton
Book, Sadness, Console

To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

Alain de Botton
Hate, Enemy, Self Loathing

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