Alain de Botton Quotes

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.