Quotes from Alain de Botton

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun

We may find ourselves arguing that, ultimately, it doesn't matter what buildings look like, what is on the ceiling or how the wall is treated - professions of detachment that stem not so much from an insensitivity to beauty as from a desire to deflect the sadness we would face if we left ourselves open to all of beauty's many absences.

the average citizen now has near-instantaneous access to information about events in every nation on earth.

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 carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair. 11.

Real desire lacks articulacy.

there can be a savage edge.

Our nation isn't just a severed hand, a mutilated grandmother, three dead girls in a basement, embarrassment for a minister, trillions of debt, a double suicide at the railway station and a fatal five-car crash by the coast.

what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name.

Tupi men were allowed to take more than one wife, and were said to be devoted to them all. 'Their entire system of ethics contains only the same two articles: resoluteness in battle and love

The libertine position denies any inherent or logical link between loving someone and needing to be unfailingly sexually loyal to them.

Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses -- a night here and there -- it doesn't always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.

I am the soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man.

The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.

I think the genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.

If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves.

we've also been forced to learn something rather more surprising: no one is particularly interested.

We are inundated with advice on where to travel to; we hear little of why and how we should go – though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia or human flourishing.

Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children

It may now be deemed 'normal' to wear cut-off shorts, expose bellybuttons, marry someone of either gender and watch a little porn for fun, but it also remains indispensably 'normal' to believe that true love should be monogamous and that one's desire should be focused exclusively on one person. To be in dispute with this founding principle is to risk being dismissed, in public or private, with that most dispiriting, caustic and shameful of all epithets: pervert.

The development of the artist provides a profound model of the process of maturation.

It is significantly more important to Rabih now that he remains attractive to Kirsten than that he is a truthful correspondent of the reality of his inner life.

Love stories begin not when we fear someone may be unwilling to see us again but when they decide they would have no objection to seeing us all the time; not when they have every opportunity to run away but when they have exchanged solemn vows promising to hold us, and be held captive by us, for life.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

Tânjim dup? opere de art? care s? ne compenseze sl?biciunile È™i s? ne ajute s? g?sim calea cea mai viabil?. Consider?m frumoase operele de art? care ne compenseaz? virtuÈ›ile deficitare, respingându-le ca urâte pe cele care ne induc anumite st?ri sau motive de a ne simÈ›i fie ameninÈ›aÈ›i, fie copleÈ™iÈ›i din start. Arta deÈ›ine promisiunea integrit??ii noastre interioare.