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.

Alain de Botton

Categorized in : Laughing Laughter Optimistic

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

Alain de Botton

smartphones challenges interesting

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.

Alain de Botton

weakness real may

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

Alain de Botton

lasts enough years

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.

Alain de Botton

pain suffering thinking

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.

Alain de Botton

giving reality years

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.

Alain de Botton

giving-up ambition journey

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

Alain de Botton

work-and-life balance fighting

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.

Alain de Botton

anxiety opposites thinking

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

Alain de Botton

intimacy capacity relationship

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Alain de Botton

normal people thinking

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.

Alain de Botton

anxiety goal promise

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

Alain de Botton

moments reading book

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.

Alain de Botton

ignored smell people

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

Alain de Botton

daffodil sunset nice

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

Alain de Botton

obvious-things too-late inspirational

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Alain de Botton

wholeness promise art

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

Alain de Botton

surrender despair events

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

Alain de Botton

excuse perfect jobs

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.

Alain de Botton

tools literature littles

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

Alain de Botton

good-relationship capacity