Quote

Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

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
Remarkable
Expensive
Joy
Bring
Cannot
Things
Powerfully
Drawn

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
Image
Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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
The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
Alain de Botton
Image
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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
The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
Alain de Botton
Image
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
Image
One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
Alain de Botton
Image
The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
Alain de Botton
Image
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton
Image
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.
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
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
Image
One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
Alain de Botton
Image
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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