(Alain De Botton) Quotes
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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.
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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.
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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.
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.
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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.
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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.
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
