Alain de Botton Quotes

I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

The great thing about acting is the longer you do it, the more you realize that all those realities are inside you. No matter how crazy they are, you can pretend that they are a part of you. The great thing about this job is you get to play with every aspect of your id and who you are.

If you were happy every day of your life you wouldn't be a human being, you'd be a game show host.

I guess maybe directors see a face that seems to have been lived in. I know that my face has been lived in, yeah.

I think being in touch with your emotions is very key as an actor, and I think experiencing life is the only way to be in touch with your emotions.

The drive toward Life is protective, thoughtful, vulnerable, and invested in immaculate love. It is this last that marks the difference between a wise heart muddy with real life experiences in the trenches and a dry heart that functions on rote concepts alone.

As an actor, I'm not sure what I had to offer the world of tragedy and comedy when I was 21. I hadn't lived a whole lot. By my middle 30s, you know, I had been knocked around a little bit.

Emotion is a full range of a spectrum, like colours. It's not just anger. How are you going to get that out with just a guitar and screaming? You need to explore everything else.

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

I want to explore the range of emotions it is possible to feel.

Everyone should go inward, get curious about themselves, and investigate their shadows. It's one of the most important gifts we can give humanity. It's one of our most vital causes.

As the years pass, and we look back on something which, at the time, seemed unbelievably discouraging and unfair, we come to realize that, after all, God was at all times on our side. The eventual outcome was, we discover, by far the best solution for us, and what we thought should have been to our best advantage, would in reality have been quite detrimental.

But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.

A 20-year-old is never going to give death a second thought, whereas someone in their late 50s is going to think about it... I don't know, 20 times a day.

There are sorrows that are not painful, but are of the nature of some acids, and give piquancy and flavor to life.

Literature gives us a memory of lives we did not lead.

I say, as a singer grows older, his conception grows a little deeper, because he lives life and he understands what he is trying to say a little more. And I think this gives. If a singer tries to find out what's happening in life, it gives him a better insight on telling the story of the song he is trying to sing.

For an actor, for me, I love being able to tap into just heavy emotions. I don't need to be balling in every scene, but I just love to feel different emotions when heading to set. It's a lot of fun to play with.

I've tried never to be easily satisfied, and I've been painting like fury now for forty years.... I have a feeling. You paint about as far as your emotions go, and that's about it.

it is better to take experience, to suffer, to love, and to remember than to walk unscathed between the fires. I've had most immunities myself - the result of an independent income combined with a personality completely devoid of sexual attractions - the two fires of poverty and passion have therefore never burned me, and I am a lesser person for my safety.

I didn't fear old age. I was just becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the only people who said old age was beautiful were usually twenty-three years old.

Life experience makes the best music. That's the thing that nobody else can offer. Nobody else can offer my life. I have a life that is fit for movies, music, and so forth. Nobody else can give that.

To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence. The man who has lived the most is not he who has counted the most years but he who has most felt life.

There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.

For almost every character I've played in the 43 years I've been working as a professional actor, I've found parts of myself. We are all bipolar in the tiniest essence of what it is. We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.