Alain de Botton Quotes, Moving Quotes, Eye Quotes

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Eye Quotes

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

5 years ago

Message Copied

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

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , People Quotes , Forgiving Quotes

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

5 years ago

Message Copied

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

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.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Heart Quotes , Mediocrity Quotes

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Maturity Quotes

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

5 years ago

Message Copied

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

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Names Quotes

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Smartphones Quotes , Interesting Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hands Quotes , Telephones Quotes

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

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Tiny Quotes , Disappointing Quotes

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Animal Quotes

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

5 years ago

Message Copied

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

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sadness Quotes , Feelings Quotes

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ambition Quotes , Simple Quotes

Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Reality Quotes , Choices Quotes

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hints Quotes , May Quotes

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

5 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Play Quotes , Judgement Quotes

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

5 years ago

Message Copied

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