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dbc040a
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Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.
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Alain de Botton |
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23be8e2
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However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable-- even, somehow, natural.
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Alain de Botton |
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aa0effc
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We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.
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Alain de Botton |
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505ed37
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first--the story of our quest for sexual love--is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second--the story of our quest for love from the world--is a more secret and shameful tale.
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Alain de Botton |
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8149b18
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In the past, Flaubert implied, idiots had had no clue as to what the carbon structure of diamonds was. Their shallowness had been entirely and reliably evident. But now the press had made it very possible for a person to be at once unimaginative, uncreative, mean-minded and extremely well informed. The modern idiot could routinely know what only geniuses had known in the past, and yet he still was an idiot- a depressing combination of trait..
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Alain de Botton |
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b331496
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We learn, too, that being another's servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.
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Alain de Botton |
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5d85373
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By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the 'right' person rather than in knowing how to love a real -- that is, a necessarily rather unright -- human being.
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Alain de Botton |
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ae03062
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the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted that the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly no the end of life.
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Alain de Botton |
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76dc012
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A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor's complexity and sadness - and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.
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Alain de Botton |
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8db037c
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One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, 'reasonableness') is irrelevant - and even possibly opposed - to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or..
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relationships
rationality
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Alain de Botton |
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aa84eda
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Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: 'Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.
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Alain de Botton |
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2a2c1ee
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I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
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Alain de Botton |
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c9d94cf
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There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face..
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Alain de Botton |
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482a35b
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Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.
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Alain de Botton |
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e3ccc7d
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He entertains a confused wish to help her, without, however, understanding that help can be a challenging gift to deliver to those who are most in need of it.
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Alain de Botton |
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114800e
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We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care.
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reassurance
love
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Alain de Botton |
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1d9344d
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Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love. Kirsten
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Alain de Botton |
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ed5c66d
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But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opp..
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Alain de Botton |
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b11d297
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In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride--or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation--takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we fare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions ..
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friendship
human-condition
masks
vanity
pride
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Alain de Botton |
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4cbd473
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How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere.
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Alain de Botton |
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f3e7826
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We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on an early dinner date would be; "And how are you crazy?" The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening u..
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Alain de Botton |
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a13062e
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Beauty is the promise of happiness.
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Alain de Botton |
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7df15ea
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chgwnh yn aghy mn` z `shq shdn mn nshd? zyr GyrmnTqy w khwdkhnh bwdn i nyzm br tmylm bh bwr an my chrbyd. agh bwdm khh z khwd by khwdy `shqnh chh khlyy r my twnst pr khnd. my dnstm wqty ngsht rwy khsy my gdhshtym khh dwstsh bdrym chh sh`fy bh m dst my dhd. Htmlan mdt h pysh z an khh chshmm hm bh khlwy'h byftd, nyz dshth m dr chhrh khsy an Sdqty r bybm khh hrgz dr chhrh khwdm ndydh bwdm.
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Alain de Botton |
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027d8c3
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The issue of how to cede to seduction is tortuous: too soon and one may appear unworthy, too slow and one may lose the interest of the partner.
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Alain de Botton |
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37fccd3
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Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...
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travel
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Alain de Botton |
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38eca41
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We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration. He
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Alain de Botton |
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f496be2
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in Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:
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Alain de Botton |
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f150c1c
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Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.
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Alain de Botton |
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b211ec8
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Hamlet,sorunlari oldugu icin mi o kadar cok dusunuyordu? Yoksa cok fazla dusundugu icin mi sorunlari vardi?
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Alain de Botton |
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e92a937
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We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage--heard in adult life decades down the line--to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities.
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Alain de Botton |
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6263eb5
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I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
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marriage
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Alain de Botton |
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3e656fa
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No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.
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Alain de Botton |
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a6ce5f6
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The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people..
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Alain de Botton |
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ff2ec16
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Kendimizi bildik bileli burclara ve kisisel fallara merak duymamizin nedeni,anlasilma tutkumuzu uyandiriyor olmalaridir.
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Alain de Botton |
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6c85c17
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Uma pessoa nunca e boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que ama-las ou odia-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.
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Alain de Botton |
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005cb4a
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To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.
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Alain de Botton |
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14c3cce
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Eu me desnudo emocionalmente quando confesso minha carencia - que estarei perdido sem voce, que nao sou necessariamente a pessoa independente que tentei aparentar. Na verdade, nao passo de um fraco, cuja nocao dos rumos ou do significado da vida e muito restrita. Quando choro e lhe conto coisas que, confio, serao mantidas em segredo, coisas que me levarao a destruicao, caso terceiros tomem conhecimento delas, quando vou a festas e nao me en..
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Alain de Botton |
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8521be0
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I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.
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Alain de Botton |
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c17cf0e
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We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
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Alain de Botton |
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614afa7
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The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains... Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day ..
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Alain de Botton |
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12bcd35
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A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.
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politics
change
disengagement
improvement
news
curiosity
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Alain de Botton |
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4734bb3
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We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.
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sulking
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Alain de Botton |
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42642af
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Objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends. We
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Alain de Botton |
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2473c66
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Our inner lives must be lent a structure and our best thoughts reinforced to counter the continuous pull of distraction and disintegration. Religions have been wise enough to establish elaborate calendars and schedules. How free secular society leaves us by contrast. Secular life is not, of course, unacquainted with calendars and schedules. We know them well in relation to work, and accept the virtues of reminders of lunch meetings, cash-fl..
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Alain de Botton |