Alain de Botton Quotes, Art Quotes, Feelings Quotes

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Distance Quotes , Curiosity Quotes

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Writing Quotes

The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Fighting Quotes , Order Quotes

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Goal Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Survival Quotes , Safe 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

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Difficulty Quotes

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Travel Quotes , Information 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

Message Copied

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

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , People Quotes , Interesting 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

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

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones...If...we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hate Quotes , Compassion Quotes