Alain De Botton

“[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.”

“Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.”

“It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.”

“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.”

“Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.”

“A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”

“..we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.”

“It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.”

“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 opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.”

“Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.”

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

“Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the color of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread. At the same time, it means acknowledging that buildings are able to solve no more than a fraction of our dissatisfactions or prevent evil from unfolding under their watch.Architecture, even at its most accomplished, will only ever constitute a small, and imperfect (expensive, prone to destruction, and morally unreliable), protest against the state of things. More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall—in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.”

“We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.”

“For many, the point of marriage isn't so much to be in love as to stop having to think of love.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”

“The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.”

“Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.”

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

“A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”

“The sulker is a complicated creature, giving off messages of deep ambivalence, crying out for help and attention, while at the same time rejecting it should it be offered, wanting to be understood without needing to speak.”

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

“To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

“You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.”

“In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.”

“After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.”

“Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.”

“Onszelf beschouwen als het middelpunt van het heelal, de huidige tijd als het hoogtepunt van de geschiedenis en onze geplande vergaderingen als gebeurtenissen van het grootst mogelijke gewicht, voorbijgaan aan de lessen die begraafplaatsen ons leren, slechts nu en dan een boek lezen, de druk van deadlines voelen, tegen collega's snauwen, ons door conferentieroosters heen werken met vermeldingen als:'11.00 uur tot 11.15 uur: koffiepauze', ons inhalig en zonder scrupules gedragen en ten slotte opbranden in de strijd - misschien is dit alles uiteindelijk de wijsheid die ons werk ons te bieden heeft.”

“Hoe machtig onze technologie en hoe complex onze ondernemingen ook mogen zijn, het opmerkelijkste kenmerk van onze moderne arbeid is uiteindelijk misschien wel iets wat in onszelf zit, een aspect van onze mentaliteit: de wijdverbreide overtuiging dat ons werk ons gelukkig moet maken.”

“We gaan in op reusachtige, ongrijpbare collectieve projecten, zodat we ons afvragen wat we vorig jaar deden, sterker nog, waar wij zijn gebleven en wat er van ons geworden is. We zien onze verspilde krachten onder ogen tijdens het pathos van een pensioneringsfeestje.”

“De door alcohol opgewekte gevechten die op zaterdagavonden in provincieplaatsen uitbreken zijn voorspelbare symptomen van onze verbolgenheid over deze vrijheidsberoving. Ze herinneren ons aan de prijs die we betalen voor onze dagelijkse onderwerping aan orde en beleid - en aan de woede die stilletjes aanzwelt achter een gezagsgetrouwe en inschikkelijke façade.”

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

“We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...”

“To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.”

“The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.”

“Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.”

“Sex will never be 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.”

“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.”

“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.”

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

“The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.”

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

“Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.”