Alain de Botton citations

Page 3

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

“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.”

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

“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.”

“The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.”

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

“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.”

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.”

“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.”

“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.”

“Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.”

“We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.”

“As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.”

“We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.”

“Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.”

“It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.”

“at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.”

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”

“We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).”

“If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.”