Quotes from Alain de Botton

What was this curious, syntactically repetitive emotion? It expressed a certain reflexivity about the amorous state, it meant deriving more pleasure from one's own emotional enthusiasm than from the object of affection which had elicited it.

Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it.

one must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself

in Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:

Though we can of course use our minds without being in pain, Proust's suggestion is that we become properly inquisitive only when distressed. We suffer, therefore we think, and we do so because thinking helps us to place pain in context. It helps us to understand its origins, plot its dimensions, and reconcile ourselves to its presence.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how to carefully administer varied doses of hope and despair.

Romantic idea of love: he has found the right person; he has opened his heart to her; and he has been accepted. But he is, of course, nowhere yet. He and Kirsten will marry, they will suffer, they will frequently worry about money, they will have a girl first, then a boy, one of them will have an affair, there will be passages of boredom, they'll sometimes want to murder one another and on a few occasions to kill themselves. This will be the real love story.

I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.

The wish to sleep with certain people can arise in us long before we have had the chance to get to know them properly – before, that is, we have had any opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with them about their history, interests and feelings.

It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved

There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one's life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside.

Kendimizi bildik bileli burçlara ve kiÅŸisel fallara merak duymam?z?n nedeni,anla??lma tutkumuzu uyand?r?yor olmalar?d?r.

The modern expectation is that there will be equality in all things in the couple—which means, at heart, an equality of suffering.

Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real selves.

Uma pessoa nunca é boa ou ruim per se, o que significa que amá-las ou odiá-las tem necessariamente em sua base um elemento subjetivo e talvez ilusionista.

Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding, even if, as Proust warns is, 'when we discover the true lives of other people, the real world beneath the world of appearance, we get as many surprises as on visiting a house of plain exterior which is full of hidden treasures, torture-chambers or skeletons.

So, in what ways are you mad?

I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.

The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.

There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.