A Quote by Alain de Botton

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

Alain de Botton

Quote Topics

Adulthood Any Babies Behaviour Chairs Children Claim Despite Disappointment Either Emerge Entrenched Equilibrium Exhaustion Exterior Far Growth Guide Happiness High Hysterical Imbalance Lasting Laying Like Listing Lives Love Mania More Our Our Lives Rage Rarely Savage Seas Seldom Ships Small Small Child Succeed Temperate Tendencies Well World

Quote Author

Alain de Botton
English - Writer
Born: December 20, 1969

What brings a real and lasting joy is our relationships with God, and our love for His other children He has put in our lives. It's people; friends and family that fulfil us. All else, fame, popularity, beauty, is so fleeting.

Lindsey Stirling

Habits are powerful, but delicate. They can emerge outside our consciousness, or can be deliberately designed. They often occur without our permission, but can be reshaped by fiddling with their parts. They shape our lives far more than we realize—they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.

Charles Duhigg

Not only is our love for our children sometimes tinged with annoyance, discouragement, and disappointment, the same is true for the love our children feel for us.

Bruno Bettelheim

Love is the key. If we start to express the spring of love within that is our true essence, our Truth, our spark of Divinity... and allow it to flow more... then all is revealed. Love becomes our guide in life, our connection with All, and our path back to Source.

Peter Shepherd

Satan wants to claim our souls and those of our children. He want our marriages and our families to fail. He wants darkness to reign. Despite thise, we needn't worry or back away from our duty to our family (present or future), our community, or others, for God will always support and bless us in our honest efforts t odo His will. He wants us to suceed more than Satan wants us to fail- and God is always more powerful.

John H. Groberg

Action for Happiness encourages each of us to live more compassionately and put the happiness of others at the centre of our lives. This is the path to lasting peace and happiness

Dalai Lama

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

Sri Aurobindo

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

Mahatma Gandhi

Under the pretext of study we spent our hours in the happiness of love, and learning held out to us the secret opportunities that our passion craved. Our speech was more of love than of the books which lay open before us; our kisses far outnumbered our reasoned words.

Peter Abelard

Babies, babies, babies! They're everywhere, aren't they? In our eyes, in our thoughts, in our arms, in our dreams. Sometimes, in our dreams, they are riding alpacas or juggling tacos - but that doesn't mean those dreams are necessarily about babies. Look, I'm not Freud.

Julie Klausner

If humanity is to survive, happiness and inner balance are crucial. Otherwise the lives of our children and their children are more likely to be unhappy, desperate and short. Material development certainly contributes to happiness - to some extent - and a comfortable way of life. But this is not sufficient. To achieve a deeper level of happiness we cannot neglect our inner development.

Dalai Lama

To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.

Noah Webster

For only as we ourselves, as adults, actually move and have our being in the state of love, can we be appropriate models and guides for our children. What we are teaches the child far more than what we say, so we must be what we want our children to become.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Many of us delude ourselves with the thought that if we could stand in the lot of our more fortunate neighbor, we could live better, happier and more useful lives. ... It is my experience that unless we can succeed in our present position, we could not succeed in any other.

Helen Keller

We should probably start searching around a little earlier in our lives for what I call parallel activities, because most of us get entrenched in our careers. And, of necessity, we're earning a living, and it's taking our time, and we're building our résumé, and we want our résumé generally to be our proficiency within our field, because chances are we're going to be applying for another position within the field. So we tend to put off a lot of this sort of what I call parallel discovery until we're either very successful and have the time to do that, or more often until we're retired.