Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Understanding
Comes
Something
Closest
Findings
Finding
More quotes by Alain de Botton
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
Alain de Botton
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
Alain de Botton
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
Alain de Botton
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
Alain de Botton
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
Alain de Botton
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
Alain de Botton
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
Alain de Botton
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
Alain de Botton
It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
Alain de Botton
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
Alain de Botton
Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
Alain de Botton
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
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
Alain de Botton
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
Alain de Botton
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
Alain de Botton
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
Alain de Botton
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de Botton
