“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our capacity for calm ultimately depends on our levels of expectation: if we suppose that most things normally turn out to be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness". — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
