Alain de Botton: Trending quotes

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Alain de Botton: 292 quotes62 likes

“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

Source: The Art of Travel

“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”

Alain de Botton

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Art of Travel

“… love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.”

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.”

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.”

Alain de Botton

Source: How Proust Can Change Your Life

“Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”

Alain de Botton

Source: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

“Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent”

Alain de Botton

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

Alain de Botton

Source: On Love

“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

Source: On Love

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Course of Love

“A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Art of Travel

“He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 284.
Context: It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity—suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.