Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 10

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• 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.

  Alain de Botton

  Heart, Mediocrity, May

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

  6 Copy quote

• I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

  Alain de Botton

  Sports, Real, School

  "Office affairs" by Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2009.

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• It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

  Alain de Botton

  Book, Writing, Sick

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• Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

  Alain de Botton

  Loss, Frustration, Intellectual

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• It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

  Alain de Botton

  Philosophy, Book, Sound

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• A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

  Alain de Botton

  Sight, Hints, Throat

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• I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.

  Alain de Botton

  Mean, Connections, Needs

  Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.73, Penguin UK

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• Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

  Alain de Botton

  Nightmare

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

  Alain de Botton

  High Standards, Standards, Idealist

  Twitter post from Mar 14, 2015

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• Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

  Alain de Botton

  Annoyed, Anxiety, Political

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• Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

  Alain de Botton

  Love And Friendship, And Love, Debt

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• 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.

  Alain de Botton

  Valuable, Tedious, Ifs

  Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.82, Pan Macmillan

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• The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

  Alain de Botton

  Anxiety, Might, Expecting

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.44, Vintage

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• A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

  Alain de Botton

  Travel, Giving, Wish

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• Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?

  Alain de Botton

  Beautiful, Lying, Believe

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• It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

  Alain de Botton

  Home, Self, Encounters

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• 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.

  Alain de Botton

  Survival, Safe, Tests

  Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.87, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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

  Alain de Botton

  Art, Suffering, Important

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• Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

  Alain de Botton

  Revenge, Victory, Way

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• What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

  Alain de Botton

  Home, Exotic, May

  "Toothbrush, bikini... and dead poet" by Philip Marsden, www.theguardian.com. May 19, 2002.

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• The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

  Alain de Botton

  People, Want, Dignity

  Twitter post from Feb 13, 2013

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• Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

  Alain de Botton

  Philosophy, Able, Hysterical

  "The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

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• Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

  Alain de Botton

  Building Up, Wave, Matchsticks

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• Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

  Alain de Botton

  Sleep, Mind, Information

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2008.

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• How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

  Alain de Botton

  People, Accepting, Offers

  1994 The Romanic Movement,'Martyrdom'.

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