Alain de Botton Quotes
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Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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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.
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The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although-to the more imaginative at least-a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
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There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.
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Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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These entrepreneurs were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.