Quotes from Alain de Botton

painless thoughts...and painful thoughts...there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, and he proposes that the painful variety is the far superior

A good way of evaluating the wisdom of someone's ideas might be to undertake a careful examination of the state of their own mind and health. After all, if their pronouncements were truly worthy of our attention, we should expect that the first person to reap their benefits would be their creator.

National decline can be precipitated not only or principally by sentimental optimism, but also by a version of media-induced clinical depression.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals, and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

Proust's suspicion of doctors... in an awkward position...for they are people who profess to understand the workings of the body, even though their knowledge has not primarily emerged from any pain in their own body.

If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? 'If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he could love someone like me?' 2.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources.

BOREDOM IS A new challenge and responsibility.

yet men die miserably every day

wanted to have read everything on the shelves at once...a precondition of becoming knowledgeable may be a resignation to, and accommodation with, the extent of one's ignorance, an accommodation which requires a sense that this ignorance need not be permanent, or indeed need not be taken personally, as a reflection of one's inherent capacities.

having acquired a skill at turning grief into ideas

the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it.

Good listeners are no less rare or important than good communicators. Here, too, an unusual degree of confidence is the key -- a capacity not to be thrown off course by, or buckle under the weight of, information that may deeply challenge certain settled assumptions. Good listeners are unfussy about the chaos which others may for a time create in their minds; they've been there before and know that everything can eventually be set back in its place.

Jesus sleeping in his mother's arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children.

conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it...whereas writing.... is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts- bare inarticulate strands- are enriched and nuanced over time...appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand

Critical to both our imaginative impoverishment and our practical enrichment is the field of endeavour known as logistics, a name rooted in the Ancient Greek military figure of the logistikos or quartermaster, who was once responsible for supplying an army with food and weaponry.

he should always be the one to ask questions, and address himself to what was on your mind rather than risk boring you with what was on his

The field seems to require a painfully uncommon synthesis of imagination and realism.

There is a lack of tact in people who their conversation look not to please others, but to elucidate, egotistically, points that they are interested in.' Conversation requires an abdication of oneself in the name of pleasing companions: 'When we speak, it is no longer we who speak...we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.

Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally "together," when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

In the wake of the affair, Rabih adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants.

It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one's body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one's legs.

peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life. Rabih

I do my intellectual work within myself, and once with other people, it's more or less irrelevant to me that they're intelligent, as long as they are kind, sincere, etc.