Quote

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Learnt
Excuse
Relationship
Stop
Actually
Perfect
Living
Jobs

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Alain de Botton
Image
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
Alain de Botton
Image
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
Image
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain de Botton
Image
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
Alain de Botton
Image
We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
Alain de Botton
Image
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
Image
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
Alain de Botton
Image
Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
Alain de Botton
Image
Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Alain de Botton
Image
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton
Image
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
Image
Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
Alain de Botton
Image
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
Alain de Botton
Image
We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Alain de Botton
Image
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
Image
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
Image
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
Alain de Botton
Image
as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
Alain de Botton