Quotes from Alain de Botton
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.
- Alain de Botton
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
- Alain de Botton
A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.
- Alain de Botton
It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully ) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.
- Alain de Botton
He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.
- Alain de Botton
We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies.
- Alain de Botton
Two people who are surprised by a lion in a jungle clearing will — unless one of them is eaten — be effectively bonded by what they have seen.
- Alain de Botton
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train.
- Alain de Botton
But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.
- Alain de Botton
We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK.
- Alain de Botton
The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
- Alain de Botton
If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.
- Alain de Botton