Alain de Botton Quotes

George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

A fearful man who knows he is fearful is far more trustable than a fearful man who isn’t aware of his fear.

You can't be wise and in love at the same time.

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That's why they look alike.

If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

I think being able to really fall in love with someone is the craziest thing that could ever happen. You know, allowing yourself to really go there and really feel those things is extremely scary.

I have nothing against romanticism. I'm all for it. I'm helpless in the face of romance.

It is very difficult for people to come in contact with their own emotions and their own sensibilities.

We all know about love, faith, sadness, despair, hope, hopelessness, longing, desire... those are things we all have inside of us, and that's what my songs are about... what it means to be a human being.

I cry a lot, and I have no problem with that at all. Listening to your emotions is part of being alive.

I think I am smart unless I am really, really in love, and then I am ridiculously stupid.

I do think entrepreneurs need to be smart, but there's another scale I never evaluated myself on that is now the source of my deepest strength: Not how much brains I have, but how much love I have.

I'm an emotional player.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

It is not only useless, it is harmful, to believe in oneself until one truly knows oneself. And to know oneself means to accept our moments of insanity, of eccentricity, of childishness and blindness.

I'm a normal person. I have emotions.

Emotions have no I.Q.

I wasn't really testing it on myself as much as I was learning from other people about what it meant to live and love with your whole heart, and then thinking, oh my god, I'm not doing that.

Falling in love with someone doesn’t mean you know any better how they feel. It only means you know how you feel.

Bad love is better than no love at all, at least you know you're alive.

Emotional intelligence grows through perception. Look around at your present situation and observe it through the level of feeling.

Unless we're completely awake, have a degree of that. We tense against love and hold on in a way that doesn't let it flow. When that's really strong, the key piece to freeing our hearts is self-compassion.