Quote

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

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Another
Persons
Best
Person
Cure
Cures
Tendencies
Action

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
Alain de Botton
Image
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
Image
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
Image
Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
Alain de Botton
Image
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
Alain de Botton
Image
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
Alain de Botton
Image
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
Image
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
Image
Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
Alain de Botton
Image
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
Image
We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
Alain de Botton
Image
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Alain de Botton
Image
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
Image
I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
Alain de Botton
Image
There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
Alain de Botton
Image
We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
Alain de Botton
Image
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
Image
Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain de Botton
Image
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.
Alain de Botton
Image
The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
Alain de Botton