|
b5e9499
|
The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
4df0141
|
What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly 'whole'.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
19cccdf
|
In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects--teaching and be..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
eb17769
|
Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, 'in a small fireproof room' -- advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, 'hidden in forests like shy deer.' Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its rol..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
95b75f5
|
hnr mshkhlt m r nkhr nmykhnd, z m nmykhwhd shdbshym, bh m mygwyd khh ndwh r dr qrrdd zndgy nwshthnd.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
2071fd4
|
It was a reminder that the labeling of others is usually a silent process. Most people do not openly force us into roles, they merely suggest that we adopt them through their reactions to us, and hence surreptitiously prevent us from moving beyond whatever mold they have assigned us. 12. A
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
7ec0d95
|
As David lifted a suitcase onto the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing himself with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined by the fact that he would be in the villa as well.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
d14c707
|
Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
d9a50b6
|
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
abee3b8
|
Every fall into love is the triumph of hope over self-knowledge
|
|
love
philosophy
idealization
on-love
essays
|
Alain de Botton |
|
5ac80c3
|
kn f`l lktb@ mdfw`an bkhyb@ l'ml mn lmHyTyn bh, wlknh knt mmzwj@ - m` dhlk - bl'ml bsh'n 'n ykwn thm@ shkhS akhr fy mkn m syfhmh; kn ktbh mwjhan l~ ljmy` wGyr mwjh l~ 'Hd bltHdyd. kn mdrkan lmfrq@ lt`byr `n '`mq dhth llGrb fy lmktbt: "'shy kthyr@ lm 'kn mhtman blbwH bh l'y shkhS bdhth 'SbHt 'bwH bh lljmy`, wlmn ywd m`rf@ 'shd 'fkry sry@, bd't 'Hyl '`z 'Sdqy'y l~ rf lmktb@."
|
|
فهم
كتابة
وحدة
فلسفة
|
Alain de Botton |
|
ef85f8e
|
Every writer is obliged to create his own language, as every violinist is obliged to create his own "tone".... I don't mean to say that I like original writers who write badly. I prefer--and perhaps it's a weakness--those who write well. But they begin to write well only on condition that they're original, that they create their own language. Correctness, perfection of style do exist, but on the other side of originality, after having gone ..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
f460972
|
To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
585b922
|
What was this curious, syntactically repetitive emotion? It expressed a certain reflexivity about the amorous state, it meant deriving more pleasure from one's own emotional enthusiasm than from the object of affection which had elicited it.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
aa33451
|
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our 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 to believe in--but how can we believe in the beloved ..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
992eb2a
|
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 ..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
2a3dfc6
|
Properly told, stories are able to operate on two levels. On the surface, they deal with involving a range of facts related to a given time and place, a local culture and a social group--and it is these specifics that tend to bore us whenever they lie outside of our own experience. But then, a layer beneath the particulars, the are hidden: the psychological, social and political themes that transcend the stories' temporal and geographic..
|
|
specifics
universalism
storytelling
stories
|
Alain de Botton |
|
1b6c86e
|
It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
058e669
|
Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union wit..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
09fc0a5
|
Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
8f9cd22
|
The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by -- rather than merely of how we want things to look.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
136130e
|
Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality. Knowing that what we now love may in the future, for reasons beyon..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
1a20f60
|
Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a building, just as no one quality can ever underpin excellence in a person.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
8e7e053
|
Journeys are the midwives of thought
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
b557b20
|
a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.
|
|
philosophy
schopenhauer
|
Alain de Botton |
|
95c1968
|
It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.
|
|
philosophy
schopenhauer
|
Alain de Botton |
|
1f1de3d
|
The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends
|
|
philosophy
schopenhauer
|
Alain de Botton |
|
4517b0e
|
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
4030eb8
|
A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others.
|
|
confidence
inspirational
insightful
self-help
self-esteem
|
Alain de Botton |
|
f8d259c
|
At the heart of a sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worthy of one. We should add: it is a privilege..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
1a06a18
|
You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is--and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.' 8.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
0244f82
|
There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of all our accumulated rage at the injustices and imperfections of our lives. It is of course the height of absurdity to blame them. But this is to misunderstand the rules under which love operates. It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate u..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
6045d4d
|
The accusations we make of our lovers make no particular sense. We would utter such unfair things to no one else on earth. But our wild charges are a peculiar proof of intimacy and trust, a symptom of love itself--and in their own way a perverted manifestation of commitment. Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we dare to be extravagan..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
97b5fc3
|
considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence:
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
ff3242d
|
Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would neve..
|
|
travel
arrivals
|
Alain de Botton |
|
8b5e870
|
Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
3122b62
|
French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
deff3a8
|
In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects--teaching and be..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
bd22e49
|
Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres's portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
72e81ff
|
chhbs Hqyqt yn st khh t, khsy ndydh bshdmn, wjwd ndrym, nmytwnym drst Hrf bznym, t wqty khsy bh Hrfmn gwsh bdhd, w dr ykh khlm, khmlan zndh nystym, t zmny khh dwst dshth bshwym.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
fc5f3b3
|
The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
|
|
morality
philosophy
|
Alain de Botton |
|
536fd2c
|
The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
0c54a3c
|
cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards. Through
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |
|
e7f5035
|
Such doubts only inflame desire. As Rabih has realized, the most attractive people aren't those who accept him right away (he doubts their judgement) or those who never give him a chance (he grows to resent their indifference) but rather those who, for unfathomable reasons - perhaps a competing romantic entanglement or a cautious nature, a physical predicament or a psychological inhibition, a religious commitment or a political objection - ..
|
|
|
Alain de Botton |