Alain de Botton
Quotes
Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”
p. 112
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
p. 163
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
p. 65
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
p. 92
Not everyone is worth listening to.
p. 33
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
p. 25
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
p. 33
We should not be frightened by appearances.
p. 206
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
p. 83
Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
p. 80
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
p. 9
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
p. 16
