Quote

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

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
Thoughts
Health
Enough
Mind
Settle
Settling
Mental
Places
Safe

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
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
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
Alain de Botton
Image
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Alain de Botton
Image
There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
Alain de Botton
Image
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
Image
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
Alain de Botton
Image
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
Alain de Botton
Image
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
Image
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
Alain de Botton
Image
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Alain de Botton
Image
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
Alain de Botton
Image
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Alain de Botton
Image
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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