Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Picks
Suggestions
Projects
Newspaper
Open
Magazine
Successful
Priorities
Care
Magazines
Take
Newspapers
Life
Deeply
Unhelpful
Pick
Bombarded
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
Alain de Botton
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain de Botton
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Alain de Botton
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Alain de Botton
For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
Alain de Botton
Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
Alain de Botton
Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
Alain de Botton
Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
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
The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
Alain de Botton
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Alain de Botton
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 oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
Alain de Botton
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
Alain de Botton
