Quote

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

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
Mind
Went
Einstein
Good
Quite
Increasingly
Think
Guy
Literary
Thinking
Term
Thick
People
Simple
Degree
Others
Degrees
Reason
Terms
Must
Expression
Cambridge

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Image
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
Alain de Botton
Image
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Alain de Botton
Image
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
Image
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
Image
According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain de Botton
Image
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
Image
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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
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
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
Alain de Botton
Image
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
Image
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
Alain de Botton
Image
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
Alain de Botton
Image
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
Image
The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
Alain de Botton
Image
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
Alain de Botton
Image
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
Alain de Botton