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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
True
Pursuit
Someone
Lack
May
Ambition
Love
Missing
Quality
Values
Culture
Closely
Another
Qualities

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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.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
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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.
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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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