Alain de Botton, a renowned philosopher and author, has a unique ability to capture the intricacies of life, love, and human nature through his insightful and thought-provoking words. His quotes resonate deeply with readers, offering wisdom and clarity in a world often clouded by complexity. In this blog post, we will explore some of the best Alain de Botton quotes, each reflecting his profound understanding of the human experience.
These quotes not only inspire but also encourage us to reflect on our own lives, making them invaluable for anyone seeking to gain deeper insights and perspectives.
Whether you’re new to his work or a long-time admirer, these best Alain de Botton quotes are sure to leave a lasting impression.
Alain De Botton Quotes
- 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.
2. There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
3. The only way to be happy is to realize how much depends on how you look at things.
4. Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
5. Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
6. Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
7. Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
8. The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
9. Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
10. Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
11. Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
12. Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
13. People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
14. We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
15. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
16. Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
17. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
18. There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
19. The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
20. People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
21. Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another–which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
22. Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
23. What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
24. Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
25. Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
26. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
27. Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
28. The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
29. Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
30. Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
31. Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
32. The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
33. Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
34. An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
35. In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
36. Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
37. Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
38. It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
39. We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
40. Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
41. As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
42. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
43. There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
44. The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
45. People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled “somebodies,” and their inverse “nobodies”-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.
46. I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
47. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
48. When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
49. Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.
50. Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-conscious, and cynical world.
51. We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
52. We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
53. 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.
54. Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
55. In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
56. The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
57. I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content – a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.
58. It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
59. It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things
60. The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
61. We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
62. Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” Our souls do not spell out their troubles.
63. Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
64. The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not – as we flatteringly think – how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
65. Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
66. Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
67. The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
68. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
69. My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
70. It is this idea ‘decency’ should be attached to wealth -and ‘indecency” to poverty – that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual’s morals ?
71. Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
72. Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.
73. Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
74. We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
75. Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
76. Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
77. I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
78. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
79. Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
80. We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
81. The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle’s formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.
82. The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
83. A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
84. 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.
85. The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it’s a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
86. One of love’s greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
87. The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
88. Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
89. I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively – I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
90. A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
91. We wanted to test each other’s capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
92. One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
93. According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being ‘like everyone else’ for ‘everyone else’ is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and ‘stand out’ in whatever way their talents allow.
94. There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
95. Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
96. It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.
97. When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
98. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
99. Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
100. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
101. 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.
102. It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others…Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
103. One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
104. Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
105. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
106. Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
107. The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
108. We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
109. How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
110. Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.
111. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
112. A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
113. Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can’t believe in any of it.
114. Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
115. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
116. Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you’ll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities – and we should take care.
117. It’s very hard to respect people on holiday – everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity – but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it’s a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
118. Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
119. For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
120. An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.
121. There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
122. I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
123. The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
124. Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
125. Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
126. It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
127. 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.
128. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
129. Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
130. Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
131. To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. 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.
132. We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
133. A good half of the art of living is resilience.
134. We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
135. Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
136. Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
137. It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
138. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
139. One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
140. Must being in love always mean being in pain?
141. Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
142. The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
143. Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
144. Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
145. One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
146. There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
147. In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
148. A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
149. The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
150. Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
151. There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
152. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
153. A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
154. Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
155. Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
156. Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
157. Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
158. The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones…If…we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.
159. It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
160. The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
161. Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
162. When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
163. 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.
164. There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.”
165. We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important – just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
166. The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
167. Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
168. Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
169. To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
170. The unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.
171. The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
172. 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.
173. A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
174. Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they’re not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they’re for all of us.
175. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
176. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity – suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
177. It’s clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
178. Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
179. By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
180. Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
181. Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.
182. We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
183. Never, ever become a writer. It’s a nightmare.
184. What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto.
185. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
186. The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
187. The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
188. Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.
189. When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
190. Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
191. If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion–and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.
192. Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.
193. Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
194. We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
195. Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
196. According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
197. Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
198. The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
199. I know a lot about writing, but I don’t know much about how other industries work. I’ve tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
200. The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
201. Life gives us no such handy markers – a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
202. A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
203. It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
204. Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
205. Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
206. As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
207. Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
208. Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
209. One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
210. Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
211. Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
212. Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
213. True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
214. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
215. As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
216. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
217. Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
218. Not everyone is worth listening to.
219. What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
220. I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
221. The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
222. The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
223. Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
224. 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.
225. Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
226. I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
227. The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
228. It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
229. Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
230. Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
231. If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
232. .. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.
233. Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
234. Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
235. Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say…but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
236. Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
237. If optimism is important, it’s because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!
238. The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
239. One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
240. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
241. Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
242. It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
243. Symons remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms – what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.
244. Rather than saying ‘I hate mess’, it might draw more compassion to say, ‘mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe’.
245. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
246. Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
247. Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
248. Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
249. All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
250. To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap.
251. We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.
252. The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets – which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
253. We should not be frightened by appearances.
254. Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
255. It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
256. The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
257. I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
258. The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
259. …if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
260. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left… having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.
261. Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
262. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
263. The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
264. For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
265. At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
266. Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
267. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
268. A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
269. Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
270. We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
271. Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
272. True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
273. One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
274. The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
275. The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
276. 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.
277. You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
278. There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you’ll reach a moment where someone goes, ‘Oh, that’s a bit heavy,’ or ‘Eew, disgusting.’ And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.
279. Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
280. People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
281. Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
282. It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
283. He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest’s eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
284. William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
285. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
286. The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
287. The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
288. We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so….We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
289. Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?
290. Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
291. The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
292. Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as “mushy.
293. A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
294. We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they’re doing it.
295. We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they’ll remember it. … Religions go, “Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it.” That’s what all religions tell us: “Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day.” Otherwise our minds are like sieves.
296. Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
297. We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
298. In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day’s work for a writer. You can’t put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
299. The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
300. To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
301. Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
302. We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?
303. Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
304. Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
305. In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
306. After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
307. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
308. Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
309. We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
310. The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
311. Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
312. How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
313. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
314. I’m also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage – which no previous society has ever believed.
315. I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
316. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
317. The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
318. Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
319. Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.
320. It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
321. On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
322. Let’s say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, ‘I’ve come here because I’m in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,’ – they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
323. There are people who say, ‘Oh this guy is quite thick.’ I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don’t mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, ‘No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.’
324. You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
325. There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
326. Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
327. Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
328. The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
329. One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
330. We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
331. You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
332. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
333. We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
334. The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
335. Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
336. What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
337. We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.
338. Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
339. It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
340. Anyone who isn’t embarrassed to who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
341. What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
342. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
343. I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
344. Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
345. Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.
346. So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
347. If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
348. Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
349. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
350. Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us…It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
351. The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
352. The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
353. That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort’s words, ‘It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.
354. No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.
355. Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
356. It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
357. Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
358. Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.
359. Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
360. The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
361. As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
362. The assumption is that life doesn’t need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents’ generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.
363. I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
364. In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
365. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?
366. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.
367. Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
368. Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.
369. We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
370. It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
371. If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
372. The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
