Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone we would really want the best for.
— Alain de Botton
The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently and wisely.
As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person.
Many people in the intellectual elite are very scared of shouting. They insist on very quiet murmurs.
Where is instruction in relationships, in the management of career, in the raising of children, in the pursuit of friendship, in the wise approach to anxiety and death? All this sort of stuff I craved to learn about when I was a student and down to this day.
My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins. The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves, and we're not joining that nonsense.
Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses, and reawaken appreciation.
In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.
The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.
We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.
Travel is a lot like love.
To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.
Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn't yet know how to say: 'I'm lonely, in pain, frightened' - distress which then unfairly comes out as an attack on the safest, kindest, most reliable thing in the child's world: the parent.
I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.
Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.
It's easy to forget how little strategic thinking ever gets done in the day. Judging by the ideas generated there, our beds have more of a right to be called our offices than our offices.
We have to put aside the customary historical reading of works of art in order to invite art to respond to certain quite specific pains and dilemmas of our psyches.
Politicians want people to be nice neighbours, but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.
Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.
If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.
I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to know what the tool is for so that we can better know how and when to use it.
At 'The School of Life', we take seriously anything that has to do with human fulfilment - and take note wherever insight on this subject can be found.
Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It shouldn't be a moment of illusion; it should be a moment of preparation.
Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.
I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make sense of them. I'm more worried that I'm going to die before I've had time.
The problem with airports is that we go there when we need to catch a plane - and because it's so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings.
The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.
Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent.
Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.
We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.
One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.
Becoming a writer wasn't a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do); it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.
The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to forget the confusion that persists about what it's really for.
I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that you've got industrial capitalism on one side and romantic love on the other. Those, along with non-instrumental art, are supposed to get you through the day?
Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice.
The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it's not a pill, that it shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to 'cheer you up' or to 'make you a more empathetic person.'
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.
Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price's philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure.
I do think that travel can be part of a journey of inner maturation, but you've got to do it right.
What we typically call love is only the start of love. Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments.
The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.
It's great to get an 'F', but you also want to give the sense that there's something outside achievement. I've seen a lot of so-called high-achievers who don't feel they've achieved much.
I've tried to write about Heathrow before and been escorted off the premises.
The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget.
Parents don't reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears, or been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.
