Top alain Quotes Collection
Discover a curated collection of alain quotes. Find inspiration, motivation, and wisdom from the best quotes in this category.
I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies.Collection: Alain
As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.Collection: Alain
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.Collection: Alain
Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.Collection: Alain
The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.Collection: Alain
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.Collection: Alain
When a restaurant is too popular, it starts to harm the reason you are there.Collection: Alain
Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people.Collection: Alain
My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.Collection: Alain
Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
I've tried to write about Heathrow before and been escorted off the premises.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.'Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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?Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
Many people in the intellectual elite are very scared of shouting. They insist on very quiet murmurs.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
As in all areas, we can improve how good we are at loving another person.Collection: Alain
One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.Collection: Alain
We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.Collection: Alain
My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.Collection: Alain
I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration.Collection: Alain
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.Collection: Alain
Therapy and counseling can do wonderful things for people. But they have emerged so far as what are sometimes called 'cottage industries' - that is, as individuals or small groups offering generally quite expensive services to a few clients.Collection: Alain
Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.Collection: Alain
Love is something that we need to learn.Collection: Alain
Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.Collection: Alain
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.Collection: Alain
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.Collection: Alain
Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.Collection: Alain
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.Collection: Alain
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.Collection: Alain
I think I have grown impatient with just being a writer.Collection: Alain