Darkness Quote by Alain de Botton

“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.” quote by Alain de Botton — Download Open image

“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

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.4 out of 5 (5 ratings)

Darkness Day to day Facts Facts of life Hope Laughing Laughter Life Nervous Optimistic Persons Pessimistic Trenches

More by Alain de Botton

“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

Image

“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.”

Alain de Botton

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

Image

“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.”

Alain de Botton

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

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

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

Image

I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.

Alain de Botton

Image

“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.”

Alain de Botton

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

“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.”

Alain de Botton

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

Image

Explore all 850 Alain de Botton quotes

More Darkness quotes

“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence…

Nicole Krauss

“Wait here, wait here!" he cried and jumped up and began to run for help toward a cluster of lights he saw in the distance ahead of him. "Help, help!" he shouted, but his voice was thin, scarcely a thread of sound. The lights drifted farther away the faster he ran and his feet moved numbly as if they carried…

Flannery O'Connor

Strange - is it not? That of the myriads who Before us passed the door of Darkness through, Not one returns to tell us…

Horace

Image

When you're scared - and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth - it feels as if you're being injected with darkness. It's like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood…

Alexander Gordon Smith

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.

Adam Zagajewski

Image

I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Federico Fellini

Image

I guess he'll have to figure out someday that he is supposed to have this dark side, that it is part of what it means to be human, to have the darkness just as much as the light- that in fact the dark parts make the light visible; without them, the light would disappear. But I guess he has to…

Anne Lamott

“I promise to respect and protect your aloneness, knowing that everything created must have its period of darkness: child and bulb, poem and personality.…

anne morrow lindbergh