Quotes from Alain de Botton

??ng bao gi? ?? sá»± Ä'au kh? c?a mình tr?m tr?ng thêm b?i ý nghÄ© r?ng có Ä'i?u gì Ä'ó không bình th??ng khi c?m th?y Ä'au Ä'á»›n sâu s?c ??n v?y. N?u ta không th?y Ä'au thì má»›i là b?t bình th??ng.

In hock to the excitements and commercial advantages of rage, the news cruelly ignores the project of consolation.

Yet there is a particular kind of pleasure at stake here, too. The news, however dire it may be and perhaps especially when it is at its worst, can come as a relief from the claustrophobic burden of living with ourselves, of forever trying to do justice to our own potential and of struggling to persuade a few people in our limited orbit to take our ideas and needs seriously.

one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.

It is because we cannot scream at the forces who are really responsible that we get angry with those we are sure will best tolerate us for blaming them. We take it out on the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal people in the vicinity, the ones least likely to have harmed us, but the ones most likely to stick around while we pitilessly rant at them.

shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders. 7.

A book is the product of another self to the one we display in our habits, in society, in our vices.

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels.

BulunduÄŸu ortamda defalarca telaffuz edilmiÅŸ bir sözcüÄŸü duymayan, t?pk? ancak anlam?n? öÄŸrendikten sonra o sözcüÄŸü duymaya baÅŸlayan birine benzeriz.

we are collectively unsure of what the point of private wealth really

Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as apparently haphazardly distributed as money; that we sever the doctrinaire connections routinely made between wealth and virtue; and that before we begin measuring our peers, we at least attempt to ensure that the taller ones have taken off their stilts, and that the shorter ones are not standing in a ditch.

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day

But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves? Why does Proust privilege the connection between ourselves and works of art, as much in his novel as in his museum habits? One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life

as we have seen, what

Appreciating the beauty of crusty loaves does not preclude our interest in a château, but failing to do so must call into question our overall capacity for appreciation. The gap between what the dissatisfied youth could see in his flat and what Chardin noticed in very similar interiors places the emphasis on a certain way of looking, as opposed to a mere process of acquiring or possessing.

at least to resist the approach of Alfred Humblot at Ollendorf and Jacques Madeleine at Fasquelle, which Proust defined as, 'the self-satisfaction felt by busy men - however idiotic their business - at not having time to do what you are doing'.

Our hesitancy was a game, but a serious and useful one, which minimized offending an unwilling partner and eased a willing one more slowly into the prospect of mutual desire. The threat of the great 'I like you' could be softened by adding, 'but not so much that I will let you know it directly . . .' Chloe and I were politely sparing each other the need to pay the full price for a candid declaration of love. 14.

We have allowed our love stories to end too early. We seem to know too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

A slightly more conscious awareness of writing as compensation may lend us energy to acknowledge our unrequited ache for more visceral forms of contact.

The epitome of empathy is said to be the capacity to look at the world through another's eyes. Though our glance on the planet is largely distorted by our crooked perspectives, we may nevertheless, with luck or agility, accede to a privileged glimpse of the view from another's shoes - and in the process claim to have been able, for a moment at least, to surmount our relativity.

Our 'ego' or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.

If we wanted to think about it,' wrote Proust, 'perhaps there is no really loving mother who could not, on her dying day, and often long before, address this reproach to her son. The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.

My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved").

We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us.