Inspirational Quotes by Alain de Botton — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.”

“Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.”

“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....”

“In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.”

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.”

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”

“...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.”

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

“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.”

“The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.”

“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.”

“Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?”

“What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.”

“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.”

“The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.”

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

“I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.”

“Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.”

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

“The 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.”

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

“There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

“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.”

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”