Alain de Botton Quotes, Practice Quotes, Contentment Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Contentment Quotes

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Assessment Quotes , Differences Quotes

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Two Quotes

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Levels Quotes

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Ideas Quotes

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Achievement Quotes , Doe Quotes

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Successful Quotes , Bombarded By Quotes

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Space Quotes , Shy Quotes

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sexy Quotes , Feelings 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

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Taken Quotes

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , Imagination Quotes

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Book Quotes , Reading Quotes

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pride Quotes , Expectations Quotes

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Essence Quotes , Alive Quotes

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Real Quotes , Cards Quotes

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , High Standards Quotes , Standards Quotes

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Successful Quotes , Years Quotes

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Valuable Quotes , Tedious Quotes

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sublime Quotes , Religion Quotes

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sex Quotes , Suggestions Quotes