• Categories
Location |   Home >> Quotes SMS >> Author Wise Quotes >> Alain de Botton Quotes
  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes , Lying Quotes
  • Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Lying Quotes
  • It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Self Quotes
  • It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Taken Quotes
  • For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Understanding Quotes , Laziness Quotes
  • Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Blessed Quotes , Sadness Quotes
  • Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Cynical Quotes
  • I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sports Quotes , Real Quotes
  • Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
    • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Song Quotes , Home Quotes