The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Alain de BottonGetting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain de BottonMost of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
Alain de BottonThe price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Alain de BottonAccording to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain de BottonIf cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
Alain de Botton