Quote

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness

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
Call
Onto
Happiness
Truths
Making
Holding
Irresolute
Place
Architecture
Ignores
Home
Available
Succeeds
Self
Merely
Wider
Important
Succeed
Selves
World
Trouble
Distracted

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
Alain de Botton
Image
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton
Image
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
Alain de Botton
Image
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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
I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
Alain de Botton
Image
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Alain de Botton
Image
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
Alain de Botton
Image
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
Alain de Botton
Image
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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
He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
Alain de Botton
Image
For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
Alain de Botton
Image
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
Alain de Botton
Image
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
Image
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Alain de Botton
Image
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
Alain de Botton