# Quote — Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

> Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

- Author: [Alain de Botton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton.md)
- Book: [The Consolations of Philosophy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-consolations-of-philosophy.md)
- Page: 53
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton#The_Consolations_of_Philosophy_(2000)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-consolations-of-philosophy/someone-who-has

## More from this book

> By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

p. 146 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-consolations-of-philosophy/by-travelling-across.md)

> To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant.
>
> We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

p. 228 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-consolations-of-philosophy/to-cut-out.md)

> In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

p. 199 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/alain-de-botton/the-consolations-of-philosophy/in-their-different.md)