Quote

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

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
Rather
Overall
States
Contentment
Life
Basis
World
Madness
Bases
Morality
Sort
State

More quotes by 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
Image
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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
Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Alain de Botton
Image
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
Alain de Botton
Image
What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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
All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
Image
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
Alain de Botton
Image
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
Alain de Botton
Image
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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 attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
Image
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
Image
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
Image
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton