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9b6ccd0
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There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.
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marry
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Alain de Botton |
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6e25dd3
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are. Our selves could be compared to an amoeba, whose outer walls are elastic, and therefore adapt to the environment. It is not that the amoeba has no dimensions, simply that it has no self-defined shape. It is my absurdist side that an absurdist person will draw out of me, and my seriousness that a serious person will evoke. If someone think..
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Alain de Botton |
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4039092
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T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
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ourselves
viewpoints
oneness
others
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Alain de Botton |
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be2f8c7
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us." P. 38-39"
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Alain de Botton |
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3cddf8c
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Pronounce a lover 'perfect' can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. 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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0af07f6
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For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.... Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a littl..
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success
promise
failure
flaws
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Alain de Botton |
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10d202f
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The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill t..
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romance
love-stories
love-at-first-sight
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Alain de Botton |
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ed322fb
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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travel
thoughts
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Alain de Botton |
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1299bed
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We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a pare..
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relationships
love
familiarity
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Alain de Botton |
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23b8050
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Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.
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Alain de Botton |
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7c4b955
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness"
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Alain de Botton |
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0e03ec3
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Beauty is a promise of happiness.
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Alain de Botton |
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6c95422
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People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated br..
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winners-and-losers
status
snobbery
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Alain de Botton |
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7c9b3c2
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.
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pain
value
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Alain de Botton |
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27307df
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We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in different places: that they had been different books for each of us. Might the same divergence not occur over a single love-line? I felt like a dandelion releasing hundreds of spores into the air - and not knowing if any of them would get through.
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Alain de Botton |
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a0812f3
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It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predomin..
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Alain de Botton |
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beb6f1d
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Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.
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Alain de Botton |
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e2552cd
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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love
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Alain de Botton |
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c63065d
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By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic medium. The fault lies with art, not life. Rather than split up, we may need to tell ourselves more accurate stories - stories that don't dwell so..
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Alain de Botton |
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3d97719
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It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can inhibit us from observing others; we become taken up with adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, we have to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
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Alain de Botton |
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59ce2ed
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Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.
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mankind
eternity
worries
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Alain de Botton |
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8a7ea9a
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It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.
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wealth
rank
folly
fame
society
ruins
power
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Alain de Botton |
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a54a99e
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For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime. But then had come..
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nature
wonder
humility
sublime
technology
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Alain de Botton |
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9785897
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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reading
newspapers
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Alain de Botton |
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c869e44
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We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
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self-knowledge
happiness
status
possessions
anxiety
materialism
desire
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Alain de Botton |
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aa4593c
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Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.
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Alain de Botton |
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d29eb27
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At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?
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Alain de Botton |
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97cb9c2
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Alain de Botton |
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b179c83
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We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.
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Alain de Botton |
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b1871f1
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Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang ..
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Alain de Botton |
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b795c50
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Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
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Alain de Botton |
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2800996
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By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell,
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Alain de Botton |
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dc76c2f
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One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love...
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Alain de Botton |
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ac7a2dd
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We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement, and then do not reach it.
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Alain de Botton |
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b3eb18e
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In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.
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Alain de Botton |
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f10c3ba
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Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronisation might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with t..
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Alain de Botton |
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2cbce17
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The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones.
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Alain de Botton |
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7f40500
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it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place where we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there." (p.23)"
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Alain de Botton |
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0f336d7
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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.
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sadness
happiness
life
art
melancholy
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Alain de Botton |
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4777d43
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Without patience or negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can't be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter-arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character. The two parties just hope the problem - so bori..
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Alain de Botton |
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1955887
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X a..
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story
travel
writing
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Alain de Botton |
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c86c31b
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It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
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reality
hope
life
aspirations
disappointments
bitterness
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alain de botton |
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07af910
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The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.
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religion
philosophy
religions
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Alain de Botton |
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52f9843
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We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness.
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Alain de Botton |