Quote

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

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
Fighting
Submission
Order
Fights
Prudence
Alcohol
Price
Daily
Reminder
Inspired
Altars
Pay
Reminders

More quotes by 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
Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
Alain de Botton
Image
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
Image
An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.
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
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
Image
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain de Botton
Image
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Alain de Botton
Image
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
Image
...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
Image
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
Alain de Botton
Image
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
Alain de Botton
Image
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
Image
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
Image
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
Alain de Botton
Image
The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
Alain de Botton
Image
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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