Alain de Botton Quotes

“As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.”

“To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.”

“What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.”

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”

“The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

“You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

“A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”

“The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.”

“The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.”

“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”

“Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love.”

“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

“Must being in love always mean being in pain?”

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

“There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”

“Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.”

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”

“We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped… We suffer, therefore we think.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”

“The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”

“What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.”

“Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

“In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.”

“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”

“We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.”

“The greatest obstacle to living a meaningful life is the sense that one has plenty of time left.”

“I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed.”

“We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”

“So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.”

“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”

“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”

“There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.”

“It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

“People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.”

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

“The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".”

“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.”

“The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.”

“Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.”

“Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.”

“The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.”

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

“There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”

“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

“It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

“The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.”

“… love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.”

“There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.”

“Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”

“Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.”

“Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”

“Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent”

“We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.”

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”