Alain de Botton: Trending quotes

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Alain de Botton: 292 quotes62 likes

“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.”

Alain de Botton

“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.”

Alain de Botton book The Architecture of Happiness

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

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

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 85.

“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.”

Alain de Botton

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

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

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“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.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of 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”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“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.”

Alain de Botton

Source: Essays in Love

“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.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”

Alain de Botton

Variant: Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Source: The Course of Love

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

Alain de Botton

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

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

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

Alain de Botton book The Architecture of Happiness

Source: The Architecture of Happiness

“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

Source: The Art of Travel