Quote

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

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
Happiness
Consoling
Rather
Depressing
Free
Bitterness
Part
Expectations
Mean
Inspire
Never
Plan
Love
Plans
Hear
Depress

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Alain de Botton
Image
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Alain de Botton
Image
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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
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
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
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Alain de Botton
Image
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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
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
Image
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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
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
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain de Botton
Image
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
Alain de Botton
Image
I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
Alain de Botton
Image
I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton