Quote

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

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
Either
Host
Rituals
Choices
Peculiar
Committing
Society
Letting
Deities
Find
Subtle
Unpleasant
Entirely
Presented
Concepts
Charming
Equivalents
Choice
Secular
Immaterial
Struggle
Ritual
Consoling

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
Image
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
Image
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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
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
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
Alain de Botton
Image
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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
If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
Alain de Botton
Image
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
Image
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
Alain de Botton
Image
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
Image
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
Image
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Alain de Botton
Image
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
Alain de Botton