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 BottonTo be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
Alain de BottonI assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de BottonPeople who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de BottonWilliam James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
Alain de BottonThe 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 autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.
Alain de Botton