Quotes from Alain de Botton

the saddest of fates - to be good and yet judged evil

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry. But an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself, leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death.

We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must be somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage - heard in adult life decades down the line - to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities.

Objects mimic in material dimension what we require in a psychological one

And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain.

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.

On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love'

The point of marriage is to be usefully unpleasant – at least at crucial times. Together we embrace a set of limitations on one kind of freedom, the freedom to run away, so as to protect and strengthen another kind, the shared ability to mature and create something of lasting value, the pains of which are aligned to our better selves.

La razón por la cual la vida puede tenerse por trivial, aunque en determinados momentos nos parezca tan hermosa, radica en que nos formamos ese juicio, por lo general, no a partir de la vida misma, sino a partir de las imágenes sin duda distintas que nada han preservado de la vida, y por consiguiente la juzgamos en términos desdeñosos.

We must reconcile ourselves to the necessary imperfectability of existence

romantic positivists"—who believed that with enough thought and therapy, love could be made into a less painful, indeed almost healthy, experience. This assortment of analysts, preachers, gurus, therapists, and writers, while acknowledging that love was full of problems, supposed that genuine problems must have equally genuine solutions.

The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified.

At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoic­ism was a crude defense against the dangers of the affections of others, dangers that would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face.

this is the one world we will ever know. 5.

see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical web. Nature adopts them very fast into her vital circles, and the gliding train of cars she loves like her own'.

There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a life formed on the basis of probability.

attempting to understand what could have eroded our sense of community, an important role has traditionally been accorded to the privatization of religious belief that occurred in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century. Historians have suggested that we began to disregard our neighbours at around the same time as we ceased communally to honour our gods.

We base our fall into love upon insufficient material, and supplement our ignorance with desire.

The ultimate goal of the art lover should be to build a world where works of art have become a little less necessary.

for lack of what is found there.

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm, nor does it arise from sentiments of which nonartists are devoid; it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

Het zou goed zijn als we structuur verleende aan ons innerlijke leven en onze beste gedachten te versterken, om tegengewicht te bieden aan constante afleidingen en versnippering.

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For must of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize, at last, that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly, through cowardly inaction.

Entrepreneurship appears to be almost wholly dependent on a sense that the present order is an unreliable and cowardly indicator of the possible. The absence of certain practices and products is deemed by entrepreneurs to be neither right nor inevitable, but merely evidence of the conformity and lack of imagination of the herd.