Alain De Botton Quotes

All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met. Every pain is an indistinct signal that something is wrong, which may engender either a good or bad result depending on the sagacity and strength of mind of the sufferer. Anxiety may precipitate panic, or an accurate analysis of what is amiss. A sense of injustice may lead to murder, or to a ground-breaking work of economic theory. Envy may lead to bitterness, or to a decision to compete with a rival and the production of a masterpiece. As ~ Alain De Botton

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours. ~ Alain De Botton

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. ~ Alain De Botton

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. ~ Alain De Botton

The truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity. ~ Alain De Botton

It is when we are incubating particularly awkward but potentially vital ideas that we tend to feel most desperate to avoid looking inside.
... we will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal and nothing to read, where our carriage is mostly empty, where the views are expansive and where the only sounds are those made by the wheels as they click against the rails in rhythmical succession. ~ Alain De Botton

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among. ~ Alain De Botton

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. ~ Alain De Botton

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. ~ Alain De Botton

And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin. ~ Alain De Botton

We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful. ~ Alain De Botton

WE END UP with the following situation: on the one hand, we have a news agenda dominated by reports of the workings of a highly complicated social science that wrestles with problems of near cosmic scale and incomprehensible difficulty, upon which it periodically delivers pronouncements at once pessimistic and resigned; and on the other hand, we have a host of inchoate, naive, innocent, impassioned but powerful longings that are carefully concealed and mostly go unmentioned for fear of sacrificing claims to decency and adult seriousness. ~ Alain De Botton

He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only having one perspective to play with. ~ Alain De Botton

We seek abroad what is missing in our own lives, what we hunger for in vain at home. (Alain de Botton) ~ Scott Driscoll

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living. ~ Alain De Botton

...love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm. ~ Alain De Botton

it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved. ~ Alain De Botton

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. ~ Alain De Botton

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly. ~ Alain De Botton

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed. ~ Alain De Botton

shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, underwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders. 7. ~ Alain De Botton

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care. ~ Alain De Botton

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. ~ Alain De Botton

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny. ~ Alain De Botton

The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated - I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . ~ Alain De Botton

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail. ~ Alain De Botton

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. ~ Alain De Botton

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope! ~ Alain De Botton

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. ~ 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

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day. ~ Alain De Botton

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment. ~ Alain De Botton

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. ~ Alain De Botton

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. ~ Alain De Botton

Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. ~ Alain De Botton

It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were. ~ Alain De Botton

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it). ~ Alain De Botton

As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination. ~ Alain De Botton

Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism, and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, one in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another. The ~ Alain De Botton

Because we inhibit the same material world and manoeuvre with languages tied to common definitions, we talk to others in the assumption that they largely share our images and conceptions. ~ Alain De Botton

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you. ~ Alain De Botton

Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. ~ Alain De Botton

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be. ~ Alain De Botton

We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble. ~ Alain De Botton

To assess a nation through its economic data is a little like re-envisaging oneself via the results of a blood test, whereby the traditional markers of personality and character are set aside and it is made clear that one is at base, where it really counts, a creatinine level of 3.2, a lactate dehydrogenase of 927, a leukocyte (per field) of 2 and a C-reactive protein of 2.42. ~ Alain De Botton

But calm is precisely what is absent from love's classroom. There is simply too much on the line. The "student" isn't merely a passing responsibility; he or she is a lifelong commitment. Failure will ruin existence. No wonder we may be prone to lose control and deliver cack-handed, hasty speeches which bear no faith in the legitimacy or even the nobility of the act of imparting advice. And no wonder, too, if we end up achieving the very opposite of our goals, because increasing levels of humiliation, anger, and threat have seldom hastened anyone's development. Few of us ever grow more reasonable or more insightful about our own characters for having had our self-esteem taken down a notch, our pride wounded, and our ego subjected to a succession of pointed insults. We simply grow defensive and brittle in the face of suggestions which sound like mean-minded and senseless assaults on our nature rather than caring attempts to address troublesome aspects of our personality. Had ~ Alain De Botton

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read. ~ Alain De Botton

One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, 'reasonableness') is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions ~ Alain De Botton

It's profoundly counter-intuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good – to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step… And yet maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun. ~ Alain De Botton

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too. ~ Alain De Botton

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. ~ Alain De Botton

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. ~ Alain De Botton

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. ~ Alain De Botton

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort.

Then there are communities - far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage - whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christia ~ Alain De Botton

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter. ~ Alain De Botton

Delusions are not harmful in themselves, they only hurt when one is alone in believing in them, when one cannot create an environment in which they can be sustained. ~ Alain De Botton

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. ~ Alain De Botton

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. ~ Alain De Botton

A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination. ~ Alain De Botton

Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her
as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find. ~ Alain De Botton

Year-end financial statements ... express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes. ~ Alain De Botton

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness. ~ Alain De Botton

So, in what ways are you mad? ~ Alain De Botton

If you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they'd probably say they didn't. Yet that's not necessarily what they truly think. It's just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don't until they're allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance. ~ Alain De Botton

The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The person who has power may influence the material or social environment, generally on the basis of possessing high-tech weapons, money, oil, superior intelligence or large muscles. In war, I am powerful because I can blow up your city walls or drop bombs on your airfields. In the financial world, I am powerful because I can buy up your shares and invade your markets. In boxing, I am ,ore powerful because my punches outwit and exhaust yours. But in love, this issue appears to depend on a far more passive, negative definition; instead of looking at power as a capacity to do something, one may come to think of it as the capacity to do nothing. ~ Alain De Botton

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself. ~ Alain De Botton

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. ~ Alain De Botton

Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2. ~ Alain De Botton

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough. ~ Alain De Botton

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although to the more imaginative at least a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves. ~ Alain De Botton

Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyone is extremely hard to live with. ~ Alain De Botton

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. ~ Alain De Botton

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw. ~ Alain De Botton

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on. ~ Alain De Botton

The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. ~ Alain De Botton

French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne ~ Alain De Botton

The death of literature had been exaggerated. Whereas on dating websites, those who like books are usually bracketed into a single category, the broad selections on offer at WH Smith spoke to the diversity of individuals' motives for reading. If there was a conclusion to be drawn from the number of bloodstained covers, however, it was that there was a powerful desire, in a wide cross-section of airline passengers, to be terrified. ~ Alain De Botton

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us. ~ Alain De Botton

For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness. Whatever the manuals may promise, there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us. ~ Alain De Botton

Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. ~ Alain De Botton

Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us. ~ Alain De Botton

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children. ~ Alain De Botton

I am the soul brother to everything that lives, to the giraffe and to the crocodile as much as to man. ~ Alain De Botton

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. ~ Alain De Botton

But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate? ~ Alain De Botton

Epicurus founded a school of philosophy which placed great emphasis on the importance of pleasure. "Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life," he asserted, confirming what many had long thought, but philosophers had rarely accepted. Vulgar opinion at once imagined that the pleasure Epicurus had in mind involved a lot of money, sex, drink and debauchery (associations that survive in our use of the word 'Epicurean'). But true Epicureanism was more subtle. Epicurus led a very simple life, because after rational analysis, he had come to some striking conclusions about what actually made life pleasurable - and fortunately for those lacking a large income, it seemed that the essential ingredients of pleasure, however elusive, were not very expensive.

The first ingredient was friendship. 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship,' he wrote. So he bought a house near Athens where he lived in the company of congenial souls. The desire for riches should perhaps not always be understood as a simple hunger for a luxurious life, a more important motive might be the wish to be appreciated and treated nicely. We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us. Epicurus, discerning our underlying need, recognised that a handful of true friends could deliver the love and respect that ~ Alain De Botton

A supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream ~ Alain De Botton

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don't work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The ~ Alain De Botton

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. WE can be a little tricky to be around. ~ Alain De Botton

Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one's life. ~ Alain De Botton

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane. ~ Alain De Botton

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. ~ Alain De Botton

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire. ~ Alain De Botton

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends. ~ Alain De Botton

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft. ~ Alain De Botton

The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace. ~ Alain De Botton

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages. ~ Alain De Botton

But we would do well to meditate daily, rather as the religious do on their God, on the 9.5 trillion kilometres which comprise a single light year, or perhaps on the luminosity of the largest known star in our galaxy, Eta Carinae, 7,500 light years distant, 400 times the size of the sun and 4 million times as bright. We should punctuate our calendars with celebrations in honour of VY Canis Majoris, a red hypergiant in the constellation Canis Major, 5,000 light years from earth and 2,100 times bigger than our sun. Nightly – perhaps after the main news bulletin – we might observe a moment of silence in order to contemplate the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the 100 billion galaxies and the 3 septillion stars in the universe. Whatever their value may be to science, the stars are in the end no less valuable to mankind as solutions to our megalomania, self-pity and anxiety. To answer our need to be repeatedly connected through our senses to ideas of transcendence, we should insist that a percentage of all prominently positioned television screens on public view be hooked up to live feeds from the transponders of our extraplanetary telescopes. We would then be able to ensure that our frustrations, our broken hearts, our hatred of those who haven't called us and our regrets over opportunities that have passed us by would continuously be rubbed up against, and salved by, images of galaxies such as Messier 101, a spiral structure which sits towards the bottom left corner of t ~ Alain De Botton

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with. ~ Alain De Botton

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold. ~ Alain De Botton