Alain de Botton Quotes, Good Relationship Quotes

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Relationship Quotes

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Travel Quotes , Journey Quotes

We should not be frightened by appearances.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Appearance Quotes , Should Quotes

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Looks Quotes

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Dark Quotes

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Finest Quotes

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Soul 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?

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Names 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

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Self Hatred Quotes

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lying Quotes , Heart 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

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Museums Quotes , Secular Society Quotes

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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