Alain de Botton citations

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

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

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

“We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”