Alain Quotes

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As ~ Alain De Botton

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours. ~ Alain De Botton

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. ~ Alain De Botton

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. ~ Alain De Botton

The truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. ~ Alain De Botton

It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside.
... we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails in rhythmical succession. ~ Alain De Botton

When I was 12, I forgot the keys to my parent's apartment. So I simply climbed up seven floors to get in. ~ Alain Robert

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. ~ Alain De Botton

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. ~ Alain De Botton

When I was 12 I made some little films with my friends. I tried to make gangster films, like Fantomas, but I remember being very disappointed with them. They weren't frightening at all. I'm sure they'd be very funny now. ~ Alain Resnais

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. ~ Alain De Botton

And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin. ~ Alain De Botton

We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. ~ Alain De Botton

WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness. ~ Alain De Botton

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with. ~ Alain De Botton

We seek abroad what is missing in our own lives, what we hunger for in vain at home. (Alain de Botton) ~ Scott Driscoll

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living. ~ Alain De Botton

...love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. ~ Alain De Botton

it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved. ~ Alain De Botton

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this "knowledge" forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The "tree" of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil "are in a combined state," where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the "tree" is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition "to eat" means "to assimilate." To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative "combines" good and evil. Adam's transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly "that of autonomy," accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be "the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law. ~ Alain De Benoist

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. ~ Alain De Botton

Paganism sacralizes and thereby exalts this world whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism sanctifies and thereby retreats from this world. Paganism is based on the idea of the sacred. ~ Alain De Benoist

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly. ~ Alain De Botton

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed. ~ Alain De Botton

shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders. 7. ~ Alain De Botton

Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing. ~ Alain Resnais

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care. ~ Alain De Botton

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes. ~ Alain De Botton

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny. ~ Alain De Botton

My films seem to be better understood and better received by the monthly publications. On television the first reactions are usually unfavorable. ~ Alain Resnais

The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated - I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . ~ Alain De Botton

In love, we have to dare everything if we really love. ~ Alain Delon

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail. ~ Alain De Botton

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

I don't want to follow the herd. ~ Alain Robert

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope! ~ Alain De Botton

Did not manage to convince the French people that we were going in the right direction. ~ Alain Juppe

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. ~ Alain De Botton

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion
and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas. ~ Alain De Botton

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. ~ Alain De Botton

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment. ~ Alain De Botton

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. ~ Alain De Botton

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. ~ Alain De Botton

Mari managed to fall asleep now and then, only to awaken with a start of fear that she had been making noise. "Do I snore when I'm sleeping?"she finally whispered to Alain.
He didn't answer.
"Alain? Are you awake?"
"Yes," he's reply finally came. "I just do not know which answer would be right."
"Just tell me!"
"Sometimes."
"Sometimes?" Mari moved her eyes enough to glance at Alain. "Loud or soft?"
"Sometimes."
"Does it ever bother you?"
Alain hesitated again. "Sometimes."
"Are you going to give me any plain yes or no answers to this?"
"Not if I can avoid doing so," he replied. ~ Jack Campbell

Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. ~ Alain De Botton

It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were. ~ Alain De Botton

Thinking about happy times on a Tuesday is like going to the beach when there is no sun. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

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 good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it). ~ Alain De Botton

I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment. ~ Alain Robbe-Grillet

I knew everything and received everything. But real happiness, is giving. ~ Alain Delon

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. ~ Alain De Botton

Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another. The ~ Alain De Botton

Because we inhibit the same material world and manoeuvre with languages tied to common definitions, we talk to others in the assumption that they largely share our images and conceptions. ~ Alain De Botton

I don't like to go over curbs, because I don't want to be hard on the car. ~ Alain Prost

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you. ~ Alain De Botton

Evil is the moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me. ~ Alain Badiou

Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. ~ Alain De Botton

The light changed slightly. Mari looked up and over at one wall. There was now a narrow, roughly door-shaped hole in it. Standing in the hole was Mage Alain.
Mari stood up, realizing that her mouth was hanging open. That wall was solid. I felt it. There wasn't any opening. She watched as the Mage took two shaky steps into the cell, then paused, some of the strain leaving his face. She blinked, wondering what she had just seen, as the hole in the wall vanished as if it had never been. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. ...
Mari took a long slow breath. 'They use smoke and mirrors and other 'magic' to make commons think they can create temporary holes in walls and things like that. It's all nonsense.' "Mages actually can make real holes in walls."
"No."
Her head hurting with increased intensity, Mari glowered at the Mage. "You didn't make a hole in the wall?"
"I made the illusion of a hole in the illusion of the wall."
Mari looked at Mage Alain for what felt like a long time, trying to detect any sign of mockery or lying. But he seemed perfectly sincere. And unless she had completely lost her mind, he had just walked through that solid wall. ...
"We can get out the same way that you got in?" Mari asked. "Through imaginary holes in the imaginary wall?" She wondered how her guild would feel about seeing that in her report. Actually, she didn't have to wonder, but she wasn't about to turn down a chance at escape.
The Mage took ~ Jack Campbell

Microphones and speakers are cousins like hoovers and hairdryers. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

Paganism therefore implies the rejection of this discontinuity, this rupture, this fundamental tear, which is the "dualistic fiction," which, as Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist, "degenerated God into the contradiction of life, instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yes! ~ Alain De Benoist

I am like every human, a manifestation of life, i am more than what this job says i am. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be. ~ Alain De Botton

We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble. ~ Alain De Botton

To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42. ~ Alain De Botton

The softest pain on earth must be the pain au chocolat. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

We must never forget that the dance is the cradle of Negro music. ~ Alain LeRoy Locke

But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone's development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality. Had ~ Alain De Botton

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read. ~ Alain De Botton

Fortunately, the courts discharged me every time after they understood what I had done. ~ Alain Robert

One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, 'reasonableness') is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions ~ Alain De Botton

It's profoundly counter-intuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good – to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step… And yet maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun. ~ Alain De Botton

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too. ~ Alain De Botton

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. ~ Alain De Botton

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love. ~ Alain De Botton

The world is neither meaningful, nor absurd. it quite simply is, and that, in any case, is what is so remarkable about it. ~ Alain Robbe-Grillet

All classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. ~ Alain LeRoy Locke

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. ~ Alain De Botton

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort.

Then there are communities - far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage - whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christia ~ Alain De Botton

The people have spoken. Their decision is sovereign. We all respect it ... I wish good luck to those who will now govern France. ~ Alain Juppe

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter. ~ Alain De Botton

Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. ~ Alain De Botton

I have no problem with the people who work hard to get success. But I think people are very jealous about success. I work very hard and they don't appreciate that. ~ Alain Prost

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. ~ Alain De Botton

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. ~ Alain De Botton

Temping in the temple of another tempo. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible. ~ Alain Badiou

In France, Christmas is a family holiday. You stay home. New Year's Eve is when you go out. ~ Alain Ducasse

If you've climbed the first 140 meters it doesn't mean that you've succeeded; you are going to succeed by climbing the last 10 meters. ~ Alain Robert

My love for you isn't just my affair, it's yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don't know. ~ Jacques-Alain Miller

To love, you have to admit your lack, and recognise that you need the other, that you miss him or her. ~ Jacques-Alain Miller

This evening, which I have tried to spirit away, is a strange burden to me. While time moves on, while the day will soon end and I already wish it gone, there are men who have entrusted all their hopes to it, all their love and their last efforts. There are dying men or others who are waiting for a debt to come due, who wish that tomorrow would never come. There are others for whom the day will break like a pang of remorse; and others who are tired, for whom the night will never be long enough to give them the rest that they need. And I - who have lost my day - what right do I have to wish that tomorrow comes? ~ Alain-Fournier

I am when i act with spontaneity, improvisation on a planned life. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination. ~ Alain De Botton

Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her
as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find. ~ Alain De Botton

Year-end financial statements ... express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. ~ Alain De Botton

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness. ~ Alain De Botton

I like the mentality of the Americans. It's like when you talk about money. ~ Alain Prost

You were not in control You had no visibility: maybe there was a car in front of you, maybe not. ~ Alain Prost

So, in what ways are you mad? ~ Alain De Botton

If you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they'd probably say they didn't. Yet that's not necessarily what they truly think. It's just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don't until they're allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance. ~ Alain De Botton