Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For the dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling what he may think of himself.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the 'transference' of an emotion from the past on to someone… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to… — 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 been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“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
