Alain de Botton Quotes

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration.

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

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

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating ...

If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you i...

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves ...

It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in h...

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the m...

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.

I do think that travel can be part of a journey of inner maturation, but you've got to do it right.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what...

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than...

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuou...

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoye...

The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually get...

There's a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you...

I'm fascinated by Comte's clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that y...

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relati...

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a ma...

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the ...

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tender...

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, c...

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

Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just...

We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than wh...

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow ...

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

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

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

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and...

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for ...

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surren...

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their miser...

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, rai...

The death of marriage has been announced so often and would seem so normal, in a sense. So what's su...

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis o...

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community ...

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

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitivel...

Where is instruction in relationships, in the management of career, in the raising of children, in t...

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

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move ...

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you ha...

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

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappe...

Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie P...

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We mig...

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around po...

We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convin...

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "lu...

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, ...

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

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will...

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yoursel...

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

My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins. The worldview was that there are idiots o...

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety th...

The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.

You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's ...

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna ...

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject....

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we ...

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtf...

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire li...

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

The core – and perhaps unexpected – thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because w...

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

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We shoul...

Travel is a lot like love.

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

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, bro...

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

And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, ma...

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for maki...

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful t...

The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get ...

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the const...

Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong wit...

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

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

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm ...