Alain de Botton
"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
118 Quotes
"It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher."
Alain de Botton
"Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason."
Alain de Botton
"Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound."
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
"Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back."
Alain de Botton
"Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from."
Alain de Botton
"Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control."
Alain de Botton
"Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time."
Alain de Botton
"The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent."
Alain de Botton
"Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people."
Alain de Botton
"Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail."
Alain de Botton
"It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great."
Alain de Botton
"The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person."
Alain de Botton
"We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us."
Alain de Botton
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
Alain de Botton
"At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are."
Alain de Botton
"The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language."
Alain de Botton
"Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'."
Alain de Botton
"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
"Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself."
Alain de Botton
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