Alain de Botton: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

“We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.”

“The greatest obstacle to living a meaningful life is the sense that one has plenty of time left.”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped… We suffer, therefore we think.”

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

“Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.”

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually”

“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”

“In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.”

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

“Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”

“What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.”

“The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

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