Alain de Botton Quotes, Beautiful Quotes, Appreciation Quotes

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Appreciation Quotes

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Spiritual Quotes

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hands Quotes , Telephones 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

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Emotional Quotes

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking 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 more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Dream Quotes , Get Over Quotes

Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Happiness Quotes , Success Quotes

Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Giving Up Quotes

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Crowds Quotes , Stuff Quotes