Zitate von Alain de Botton

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

—  Alain de Botton

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

—  Alain de Botton

„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.“

—  Alain de Botton

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

—  Alain de Botton

„I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed.“

—  Alain de Botton

As quoted in "The Art of Connection – A Conversation with Alain de Botton" by Kim Nagy in Wild River Review (19 November 2007).
Kontext: I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.

„So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.“

—  Alain de Botton

As quoted in "The Art of Connection – A Conversation with Alain de Botton" by Kim Nagy in Wild River Review (19 November 2007).
Kontext: I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.

„We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.“

—  Alain de Botton, buch The Consolations of Philosophy

Quelle: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter VI, Consolation For Difficulties, p. 228.
Kontext: To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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

—  Alain de Botton

„One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.“

—  Alain de Botton

„We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.“

—  Alain de Botton, On Love

Quelle: On Love

„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.“

—  Alain de Botton, On Love

Quelle: On Love

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

—  Alain de Botton

„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.“

—  Alain de Botton, buch The Architecture of Happiness

Quelle: The Architecture of Happiness

„Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.“

—  Alain de Botton, buch Status Anxiety

Quelle: Status Anxiety

„It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.“

—  Alain de Botton, On Love

Quelle: On Love

„People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.“

—  Alain de Botton

„What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.“

—  Alain de Botton, buch The Architecture of Happiness

Quelle: The Architecture of Happiness

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

—  Alain de Botton

„A good half of the art of living is resilience.“

—  Alain de Botton