« All One Quotes · Alain de Botton's Page
Best One Quotes by Alain de Botton
- 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…
- 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…
- 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,…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
- One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
- Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
- 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.…
- One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
- 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…
- One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
- The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint…
- What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
- To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.
- 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…
- 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…
- A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake…
More One Quotes
- In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism. — Hannah Arendt
- Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but… — Hannah Arendt
- Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake… — Hannah Arendt
- Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either… — Hannah Arendt
- To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough… — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the… — Hannah Arendt
- Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and… — Hannah Arendt
- I find that it's hard to fully examine one's life and not have faith be part of the discussion. — J. J. Abrams
- The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. — Aristotle
- All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. — Aristotle
- Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes… — Aristotle