Alain de Botton Zitate

„Nicht verstanden zu werden, kann als Zeichen dafür verstanden werden, dass es in einem viel zu verstehen gibt.“

„Liebe zu empfangen bedeutet, sich selbst als Gegenstand der Besorgnis zu fühlen: Unsere Anwesenheit wird wahrgenommen, unser Name wird registriert, unsere Ansichten werden angehört, unsere Fehler werden mit Nachsicht behandelt und unsere Bedürfnisse werden bedient. Und unter solcher Fürsorge blühen wir auf.“

„Die einzigen Menschen, die wir für normal halten, sind diejenigen, die wir noch nicht wirklich kennen.“

„Der größte Teil dessen, was wir Persönlichkeit nennen, ist durch unsere Entscheidung bestimmt, wie wir uns gegen Angst und Traurigkeit verteidigen.“

„Liebst du mich genug, dass ich vor dir schwach sein kann? Jeder liebt Stärke, aber liebst du mich wegen meiner Schwäche? Das ist der wahre Test.“

„Intimität ist die Fähigkeit, jemandem seine kleinen Merkwürdigkeiten zu zeigen und festzustellen, dass das für ihn in Ordnung ist.“

„Nur wenige auf dieser Welt sind einfach nur böse. Diejenigen, die uns verletzen, leiden selbst unter Schmerzen. Die angemessene Antwort ist daher niemals Zynismus oder Aggression, sondern in den seltenen Momenten, in denen man das schaffen kann, immer Liebe.“

„Ich denke, wohin es Menschen verschlägt, ist das Ergebnisse einer Kombination von Ermutigung, Zufall, Glück etc. Meine Karriere wurde - wie viele andere auch - dadurch bestimmt, dass einige Türen sich öffneten und andere sich schlossen.“

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

“To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.”

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”

“What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.”

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”

“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped… We suffer, therefore we think.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

“There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”