Frases de Alain de Botton

“Proust dijo en cierta ocasión que a las mujeres de belleza clásica había que dejarlas para los hombres sin imaginación, y”

“Uno de los principales inconvenientes del amor, al menos durante un tiempo, es que corre el riesgo de hacernos felices.”

“enojo poco después de recibir una ofensa es la cosa más generosa que uno puede hacer, pues le ahorra al ofensor el florecimiento de la culpa y la necesidad de hacer bajar al ofendido de su torre almenada. Como”

“El clímax lógico del amor inmaduro [por ser absoluto] se alcanza en la muerte, real o simbólica, el clímax lógico del amor maduro se alcanza en el matrimonio y la tentativa de evitar la muerte a través de la rutina [los suplementos dominicales, las prensas para pantalones, los electrodomésticos manejados por control remoto]. Pues el amor inmaduro no acepta ningún compromiso, y en cuanto dejamos de aceptar compromisos, ponemos rumbo hacia la muerte. Para alguien que ha conocido las cimas de la pasión inmadura, aceptar el matrimonio es un precio insostenible: más le valdría poner fin a la farsa despeñándose en coche desde un acantilado.”

“Preferible por muchos conceptos, la filosofía del amor maduro se caracteriza por una conciencia activa del bien y del mal dentro de cada persona: la templanza la preside, se resiste a la idealización, está libre de celos, masoquismo y obsesiones, es una forma de amistad que incluye una dimensión sexual, es agradable, pacífica y correspondida [y tal vez explique por qué la mayoría de quienes han conocido el deseo denegarían a su manifestación indolora el calificativo de amor]. Por”

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

“To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.”

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.”

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

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

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

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

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

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

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”

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

“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

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

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped… We suffer, therefore we think.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

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

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

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

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

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”