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"We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."
"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."
"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."
"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."
"I don't need psychologyI am not a sociopathNeither and Psychopath."
"Do not focus on your failings, for you will only encourage them. If you keep beating yourself up on the head over these, you will only reinforce them."
"You must give permission for people to alter your thoughts. No matter how hard they knock, they can't get into your brain unless you open the door."
"When we hold-on to someone's imperfections we become emotionally pair-bonded to their maladies."
"Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: 'Perhaps I need someone else to control me."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us."
"For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....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 aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle."
"The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it-just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her."
"Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5)The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is."
"There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them."
"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."
"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."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that."
"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."
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